This bloated Saturday

ut in terms of promoting the sport to the less committed how are they going to give any of these races any sort of build-up and context?
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not by showing it on a wednesday. The less committed will be the unemployed, flu victims and the coffin dodgers

The Brigadder gerrard is a fine meeting but pointedly doesnt get a great crowd. Fact is that true racing fans (on flat anyway) are a dying breed and gearing meetings towards them doesnt pull in the cash

Krizon is right about windsor although back in the day it was a betting bearpit with more than a few what might be called "faces" around the place
 
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krizon said:
On the one hand, it's great for racing fans who work regular weekdays to see the big races, but on the other, the courses are then stuffed to the gills with overpriced hospitality boxes and the lager-lager-lager louts who are mostly there to behave like prats.
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That wouldn't be the case in Ireland though where we no longer have the overpriced hospitality boxes and bar a few meetings, we don't have the lager lout culture on track.
 
Cant afford to get pissed. You are potless

its overplayed here. I go racing a fair bit and rarely see anything out of order. Sandown saturday was a great atmosphere

drinking is more heavy at northern meetings ive found though, but no bother ive found
 
Yes... a quite awful prospect for any racing fan colin. Land of my fathers belted out for four hours whilst trying to study the form :)
 
clivex said:
not by showing it on a wednesday. The less committed will be the unemployed, flu victims and the coffin dodgers

The Brigadder gerrard is a fine meeting but pointedly doesnt get a great crowd. Fact is that true racing fans (on flat anyway) are a dying breed and gearing meetings towards them doesnt pull in the cash

Krizon is right about windsor although back in the day it was a betting bearpit with more than a few what might be called "faces" around the place
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The Sandown meeting used to be cracking when it was on the bank holiday

Anne Boleyn Maiden Fillies Stakes
BG Stakes
Whitsun Cup
Temple Stakes

Apparently though they make more money on a Thursday
 
slightly wrong there.. the bg was always tues evening. the henry 11 was monday.

but no matter, ive heard that too and baffles me . i used to always go on that monday and crowd was a lot bigger
 
BennyB said:
Agree entirely with that. Why not put the best racing on when the largest number of people are free to watch it, i.e. evenings and weekends. Sunday racing is rubbish quality here, why not move more big races to Sundays?
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I'll wager that it's got something to do with the fact that the French and the Irish already do it - that's just the sort of idiotic thinking that could actually be the case.
 
clivex said:
slightly wrong there.. the bg was always tues evening. the henry 11 was monday.

but no matter, ive heard that too and baffles me . i used to always go on that monday and crowd was a lot bigger
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No - in the 1970s and 1980s - that was the card . The Henry II was on the Tuesday afternoon
 
Richard Hughes in the Racing Post on the subject, from Ben Hutton's blog:

Look Hughes standing up for existing racefans

The Richard Hughes column in every Saturday's Racing Post has been a revelation. He is refreshingly open with his thoughts and it is hugely fascinating to know what's going inside the mind of this likeable and extremely intelligent rider.

And somehow he has gone up another notch in my estimation this morning with his piece regarding Newmarket moving their JulyCup card to a Saturday, and how this affects racing's existing fans.

They're not the only ones complaining about the July Cup and its associated card moving to a Saturday. Trainer Richard Hannon has said "it's no fun any more" in trying to sort out jockeys for four excellent meetings at Ascot, Chester, Newmarket and York, featuring a Group 1, two Group 2s, three Listed races, five class 2 contests and six class 3 handicaps.

Then there are the bookmakers, with Ladbrokes unhappy that a previously busy Wednesday is now a quiet one, and an already busy Saturday won't be much busier in terms of turnover. It's like when Valentine's Day falls on a Saturday for a restaurant - they'd be fully booked anyway.

Racing's existing fans - those who go racing for a bet and for their love of the game, as opposed to those who go for a day on the ale and the fizz - don't really have a voice when it comes to supposed improvements to the racing experience. When they do pipe up in opposition to changes that are being made it is all too simple for them to be shouted down as relics who won't move with the times, when it is seen as important to move with the times in order to attract a new and younger audience.

So it was good to see Hughes sticking up for them. Well, us.

A similar move has been made with York's four-day Ebor meeting, which now concludes on a Saturday instead of a Friday. As a result, myself and my friendswon't be going on the Saturday and will be missing a day of the Ebor meeting for just about the first time ever in our adult lives.

It will be too busy to be enjoyable, and we'd be uncomfortable in the drinking environment that tends to prevail at York and other tracks at the big Saturday meetings - and I'm sure we won't be the only ones.

Racedays that resemble going to a giant Wetherspoons definitely have their place as they must be hugely lucrative for the racecourses, and anyone who doesn't appreciate them can choose not to go to events such as the John Smith's Cup.

However, when a day featuring the Ebor, Lonsdale Cup and Strensall Stakes is taken away from the loyal, existing fans who attendevery single day of a meeting and, in order to generate greater revenue for the racecourse, handed to racegoers whose motivation for attendance is to drink and socialise, it smacks of selling out.

York could stage seven class 4 handicaps worth ten grand each on a Saturday and the attendance and the levels of consumption of booze would hardly be affected, so why not keep the four days of the Ebor meeting as they are during the week and append a lesser card on the Saturday to bring in the drinkers and their cash?

From a personal point of view the racing experience at York is the best around, but the Ebor meeting moving to a Saturday leaves a sour taste.

As does a hospitality tent encroaching on the viewing space at the pre-parade ring meaning that paddock watchers can be just one deep on the rail - two-deep and you block the route to the toilets.

As does the removal of any access to the Tote Credit room if you're a Grandstand and Paddock ticket holder. While we enviously watch the County Stand badgeholders stroll in and out of their Tote Credit door adjacent to the lawn, we're left to badger the excellent staff for slips through the perspex screen and lean on the bins to write out our Placepots.

York and Newmarket are in danger of alienating their most loyal customers by sticking two fingers up to their devoted, regular midweekers who don't like going racing on Saturdays.

My group lives too far away to attend the July meeting, but if York rearranges their three-day Dante meeting so it ends on a Saturday then we simply wouldn't go. It wouldn't be worth a five-and-a-half-hour round trip for only two days and negotiating just one night's stay in a hotel would be difficult, if not impossible.

So like Hughesie says: "It's not right to tear down racing as we know it in pursuit of a different audience. By doing that, racing could end up withno-one."
 
Colin Phillips said:
So like Hughesie says: "It's not right to tear down racing as we know it in pursuit of a different audience. By doing that, racing could end up withno-one."
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Very well put by Richard Hughes.

It was interesting to see Stephen Wallis defending the move to the Saturday in today's Post. According to him it's all about television and the Global Sprint Challenge: "...everything we've said about the July Cup needing to be on a Saturday stands, and the fact that we had Sky Racing Australia live at Newmarket for the first time, the fact that Singapore, Hong Kong and other territories took it, is part of our point. The most important element for Britain is the Global Sprint Challenge; the July Cup has to be on a Saturday. Television is a major influence on sports timetables and worldwide television, and therefore worldwide betting is a key component of the future funding of British racing."

The more you analyse that last sentence the less it makes sense but that's by the by. More to the point, this is a completely new line of reasoning on his part. The move to a Thursday-Saturday meeting was signed, sealed and delivered in July 2009. Wallis floated the idea in the run-up to that year's July Meeting, was obligingly interviewed on the subject by Alastair Down on C4 during it and within days it was a fait accompli. A quick search of the Post's archive for the relevant period is illuminating:

"Newmarket chief executive Stephen Wallis is keen make the July festival a Thursday-Saturday fixture, possibly as soon as next year, to reverse declining attendance, in particular on the Wednesday, a change that would put the Darley July Cup in direct competition with John Smith's day at York, as well as valuable meetings at Chester and Ascot." (July 12, 2009)

"ACCORDING to Newmarket managing director Stephen Wallis, attendance figures support his inclination to move the July festival fixture towards the weekend to run on a Thursday, Fridayand Saturday.
Only 5,590 had attended yesterday's opening fixture, which featured the Group 1 Falmouth Stakes, the lowest recorded crowd for any day of the meeting since 1997.
Last year's opening day attendance wasover 6,000 and Thursday's second day figures were nearly 400 lower than the previous year's tally of 14,629.
Ladies' Day lured the crowds back to Newmarket when 14,234 racegoers swelled the racecourse on Thursday.
"If Wednesday's attendance was disappointing, we've got to be delighted with Thursday's," said Wallis.
He added: "As we were quite a lot down on hospitality bookings it has not been a bad day.
"We are now definitely thinking about making this a Thursday, Friday, Saturday meeting. Whether we do it next year is debatable but we could have it in place in 2011." (July 9, 2009)


There wasn't any mention of worldwide television at the time. The funny thing is that he was trumpeting the attendance figures this week, a total over the whole meeting of 34592, as "eight per cent up over three days" but chooses not to mention the fact that this figure is virtually identical to the 34089 achieved in 2005, the last year in which the fixture was a Tuesday-Thursday one. I think Mr Wallis is a slippery customer.


A final point is that Chester's chief exec, Richard Thomas, was highly critical of Newmarket but William Derby at York didn't join in with him. Hardly surprising, given that York are doing exactly the same next month as Newmarket this.
 
gus said:
"Television is a major influence on sports timetables and worldwide television, and therefore worldwide betting is a key component of the future funding of British racing."
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Actually, that sentence probably deserves a thread of its own. A prize for anyone who can successfully decipher it and an additional prize for anyone who can justify the words "and therefore".
 
Greg Wood in The Guardian:

"Just over 100,000 people went to the races in Britain last Saturday. The attendance at York was better than the biggest crowd at Goodison Park during the Premier League season, while Chester's crowd of 36,500 was narrowly ahead of the best gate at Spurs. And on Monday morning, once the money had been banked, came the recriminations.

Chester is annoyed that Newmarket has shifted its entire July Festival meeting back by a day, to run from Thursday to Saturday, with a knock-on effect that the Roodee's City Wall Stakes moved to York to ensure coverage by Channel 4 racing. Richard Thomas, the Chester chief executive, pointed out that barely 10,000 racegoers made their way to Newmarket, and questions whether Saturday's fixture congestion is really a price worth paying.

Newmarket, though, counters that its attendance was up by 8% over the three-day meeting, and that Saturday is the ideal position for a Group One event like the July Cup, particularly with a view to growing overseas audiences – and betting turnover – in years to come.

In a sense, they are both right, since the executives at both courses are arguing, understandably, from their own point of view. But if a bumper weekend of attendances at four of the sport's most important venues can lead to bickering, it also suggests that before it can stride boldly into a commercial future, racing will first need to decide what, exactly, "racing" is.

Chester and Newmarket are both in the business of staging athletic contests between horses for the benefit of a paying public, but their actual markets are so different that "racing" effectively means something different depending on whether you are in Cheshire or Suffolk.

One point that Thomas was possibly too polite to make is that Chester's attendance on Saturday outstripped not just the total for the card at Newmarket the same afternoon, but the gate for the entire three-day July meeting. And if the best races from the Thursday and Friday at Headquarters had been squeezed on to a single Saturday afternoon, the attendance would not have been appreciably higher. Its catchment area is sparsely populated, and its crowd is rarely rises past 20,000 even for its Classics.

Newmarket's appeal is that it has the very best horses on show for those who are willing to take the trouble to get there. Chester's overall programme falls far behind Newmarket's in terms of quality, but thanks to outstanding management and marketing, it packs in the punters from its densely-populated surrounding area, to watch competitive cards with only a sprinkling of Listed or Pattern-class events. Last year, their numbers were up by 22%, and on some of its summer Sundays, cars are queuing almost from dawn to get a good pitch on the infield.

In terms of the needs of off-course punters, there was something for everyone at both Chester and Newmarket on Saturday, with the Bunbury Cup at the Suffolk track probably second only to the John Smith's Cup at York as the biggest betting event of the day. But if Britain is to export its racing product to potentially valuable markets overseas, then a Group One event like the July Cup is going to be vitally important, particularly if, as part of a series, it can attract runners from markets like Singapore and Japan too.

The important point in terms of the future is that British racing is not a single product. Races make money from several different markets and the range will widen if foreign punters can be persuaded to bet on it too. The relative importance of those markets varies from one track to the next and even from meeting to meeting at an individual course.

As a result, the conflict between the courses that staged racing on Saturday is less significant than it seems. They are doing what they do best, and that must be good for the sport and the industry."
 
Or the July Cup - if they were so desperate to have it on a Saturday - this is about the weakest of the summer except for that day with the Rose of Lancaster Stakes in August .

I must admit to thinking that moving the last day of the Ebor meeting is a good idea - that saturday was always bloody awful
 
The Hungerford at Newbury is the same weekend as the Gt St Wilfred, it is usually a decent enough race.

I'd reckon that the worst Saturday's racing is the one before Royal Ascot It is just awful.
 
The International Handicap at Ascot has attracted a terribly boring field as usual. When this race was first conceived some really decent animals took part - now we get a top weight rated 104. King George apart it's a really nondescript Saturday. Again.
 
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