The Wright Perspective: so much has changed but the quest to find agreement on the best way forward goes on

This article was first published in the Racing Post on August 8, 2012

• Racing Post founding news editor Howard Wright dies at the age of 79 
  

Imagine a time when horseracing in Britain took place only on grass, from Monday to Saturday; the Flat opened with the Lincoln in March and finished with the November Handicap, in November naturally, while the jumps season ran from the beginning of August to the end of May, and the evening race-meeting programme closed as the hours of daylight got shorter towards the end of August.

Overnight declared runners had recently been introduced, but the names of riders appeared with 99 per cent accuracy only thanks to the painstaking work of Press Association reporters, and no-one outside the closest connections knew that blinkers and hoods – cheekpieces had not been invented - were to be carried until horses arrived in the parade ring.

On the Flat, the draw for starting positions was made by the clerk of the scales on the day, with no chance of being relayed to the mass of people betting on the race. Runners were sent on their way by the raising of a broad mesh of elastic tape stretched across the course and propelled forwards at an angle of around 45 degrees.

The sport itself was governed, regulated and administered by and on behalf of a band of generally well-heeled people called stewards, belonging to an almost male-only private club, which went by the name of the Jockey Club, elected its own members but with no jockey – other than a handful with experience as amateurs – on its roll of honour.

The scenario from a bygone age must be at least a century old. In fact, it was June 1964, when an 18-year-old from Doncaster turned his back on the safe bet of a career in the civil service, returned to his home county after six months in London and started on the shop floor of racing journalism at Timeform.

Manchester racecourse had closed the previous November; Lincoln was to follow at the end of the year, and in between Royal Ascot lost two days at the height of a British summer to rain. But fast forward to April 15, 1986, when I was fortunate to be part of the launch of the Racing Post, and what had changed?

More information, such as overnight draw, was available to punters; the European Pattern and International Classifications had been introduced, bringing with them greater understanding of racing outside Britain and Ireland, and the Maktoum family had challenged the old order of owner-breeders and new money.

But turf was still the only racing surface; the Flat season opened at Doncaster in March and closed there in early-November, and the Jockey Club continued to rule the roost.

Twenty-six years on and no-one can doubt that the way British horseracing and betting is conducted today has undergone the greatest number and range of changes than in any other equivalent period.

A new generation of racing followers and punters has grown up and lived through a welter of administrative and practical upheavals that their fathers, however strong their reforming zeal, could hardly have believed possible, and their grandfathers would never have remotely contemplated.

Thanks to the Jockey Club stewards’ foresight in seeking an insurance policy for the loss of winter jumps meeting to bad weather and seizing an opportunity when the straightjacket of Britain’s Sunday trading laws was loosened, racing goes on all year round, seven days a week.

The first meeting on an artificial surface was held at Lingfield in October 1989; floodlights were switched on for the first time at Wolverhampton in January 1994, and Sunday racing with betting arrived in 1995.

Each innovation helped to expand the fixture list to meet demands from customer-led racecourses and betting-session-needy bookmakers. Whatever some critics might say, without the extension British horseracing would have sunk even deeper under the oncoming waves of sports and internet betting than it has.

Perhaps surprisingly, the major driving force for change in racing came from within the Jockey Club, the one constant in the sport since its 18th century stirrings but the butt of derision for clinging to its self-electing oligarchy in more egalitarian times.

However, its enlightened senior steward ‘Stoker’ Hartington (later the Duke of Devonshire) identified the need and crystallised the means to meet modern demands through a representative and accountable governing body.

Without Hartington and his capacity to carry the support of the Jockey Club’s backwoodsmen, history would not have been made in June 1993, when the British Horseracing Board took over governance, leaving the old organisation to concentrate first on regulation and integrity and then, most successfully, on commercial and charitable pursuits.

Fourteen formative years later, and following a failed attempt led by BHB chairman Peter Savill to construct a database-linked funding arrangement with the betting industry, which was scuppered by the European Court of Justice’s acceptance of an appeal by William Hill, an even more significant change was fashioned.

Partly as a result of urgings that came originally from a Labour government desperate to promote further modernisation, in the bold but still unfulfilled hope that it could step away from direct involvement with the sport through its statutory duties towards the levy, the BHB merged governance and regulation into one body, the British Horseracing Authority.

The sport’s commercial aspirations were handed over to Racing Enterprises Ltd, a 50-50 joint venture between horsemen and racecourses, so far best known for its Racing For Change initiative, which for those with long experience provides a reminder of regular searches for new customers and fresh opportunities.

Meanwhile, the Levy Board continued to redefine its relationship with the racing industry, slimming itself by selling off United Racecourses, Racecourse Technical Services (later RaceTech), the Horseracing Forensic Laboratory and National Stud.

Still the central funding body, the board has soldiered on, variously threatened by closure then reprieved by the failure of at least two major government-backed inquiries to find an acceptable and suitable replacement funding mechanism.

And so to the future, as racing clings to its popular appeal as a spectator sport, while supporting two dedicated satellite TV channels, but prepares to go dark on the BBC and continues to lose ground in the betting market. Change goes on.

Under new chief executive Paul Bittar, the BHA is subtly restoring some commercial clout to its post-Nic Coward stance as nothing more than a governing and regulatory body.

Yet the sport’s most potent power base is still most likely to be shared between REL’s partners, the racecourses and the Horsemen’s Group, which following the acrimonious debate over prize-money tariffs may remain uneasy bedfellows until personality issues are resolved.

Last week’s news that Hereford and Folkestone racecourses, now part of an enlarged second main grouping of tracks following Reuben Brothers’ merging of Northern Racing with Arena Leisure, are threatened with closure has done nothing to ease the tension between two parties that need each other in equal measures.

The Tote has at long last been removed from government shackles, delivered into the hands of a privately-owned bookmaker, to the disgust of various racing elements but no surprise to those on the outside.

However, the levy system remains under threat of extinction, as Westminster’s coalition busies itself with trying to resolve old issues and solve new ones such as offshore betting and the position of exchanges in a modern financial framework, both of which impinge on racing’s future.

So, the wheel keeps spinning. But, in some respects, does it keep moving forwards?

Back to 1964, three years after racing first received direct payment from bookmakers, and the words of Len Scott in Ruff’s Guide: “By hugely increasing prize-money for a few prestige races the Levy Board has not done the service to British racing which was expected. The need is to spread the levy butter a little more thinly and widely.”

Today the cry of “too much racing, too little prize-money” echoes across the collection of small businesses that service British racing. Agreement on the best way forward seems as far away as ever.

Howard Wright

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