What Will They Come Up With? (BHA Consultants report)

My goodness, is it really? That's very naughty indeed! Chappers is always on about 'the only free to air', blah, blah.
 
Well I'm not actually correct there. You can choose two packs for the basic price and then add two more for additional. If you want ATR you can have it as your basic with the cookery channel and Cops Gone Bad, but if you want BBC, Channel 4 etc then you end up putting ATR on as an extra pack which knocks you into the additional cost. Sky are very clever in Ireland with the packs and know how to make most money out of it.
 
Very slyly thought out, too. Would it be free if it were accessed via cable (as I do), rather than satellite? I have ATR and RUK on my Virgin package here - you do get Virgin in Ireland, I assume? I can't access Sky because our block of flats is probably the only one in Brighton without a blasted satellite dish/aerial.
 
Whose idea was it to spunk £250k on a bunch of suits offering their crappy opinions?! Assuming the BHA funded that, why didn't it go into prize money instead??
 
"If racing came to life as a person," John Harrison, one of the firm's senior *partners, said yesterday, "we think it would be a bit of a Brian. Brian is traditional and *British and thinks in quite an old-minded way. He's got a group of friends that are very loyal, and when they get together they have a fantastic time, but then talk in a language that no one else can understand"


Do you think they've found someone in a focus group somewhere:whistle:
 
I'm sure it was democratically-arrived at behind closed oak-panelled doors, Shadz... and what are the chances of it being discussed robustly by the racing hacks?
 
Last edited:
Why don't more courses do reduced admission for a three day (or four in the case of the Ebor meet) ticket like they do at York.

£17 a day in Grandstand/paddock for the Dante meet but only £40 for the three day ticket,that's a big saving.
 
Their whole response looks a bit like a formula to me.

Target young people, and target females.......urm..... where I have heard this before? the designer alcohol industry?

Young women attract young men etc It's almost as if the consultants done a scissors and paste exercise from a previous report and removed the pub chain and inserted the racecourse. The young and sexy set might work for some locations, but I'm struggling to think there's too many champagne corks popping in Hexham. I'm struggling to see how ditching Brian and courting Ben is going to bring droves of new recruits to watch a selling hurdle on a cold Tuesday in February.

I suppose venues like Chester have a distinctly feminine feel to them, as might Windsor?

If Chester was a course her name would be Bianca. She is ambitious and showy and likes to surround herself with beautiful images and been seen in all the right places. She's conscious of what people think of her, even if she pretends she isn't. She regards herself as sophisticated, and refined. For her the racing is but a backdrop, a necessary scenary change that she likes to pose against. Deep down however, she wants to marry a footballer and get a job as an actress in a teen soap.

Doris however, goes to Catterick. She is dependable and traditional and has many years of fluvial sculptured erosion on the north facing profile of her visage, as well as evidence of glacial abbrasion from the many icicles that have formed on the end of her nose in the winter months.

Penelope used to be Ascot, but thinks that its temporarily trendy to slum it at the revolutionary alternative on the Sussex Downs because this is as close as she dare get to regsitering her disapproval with the ruling class elite. She thinks she's mixing with more ordinary folk by 'doing Goodwood' this year, and that in turning her back on mummy and daddy's preference she's carving out a radical chique identity of her own

Mandy just goes to Aintree and gets pissed
 
Last edited:
Warbs: I love those descrips of courses as ladeeeze! Must think of them more in those terms now, if we're to all be part of this wonderful re-branding of racing. But I think you've got it about right - won't be long before they're invited to dump their boring old names and come up with razzy new ones, just as out went the old White Lion and in came the Toad & Bucket, or whatever. So, Towcester might become The Big Freebie, Plumpton the Tractor & Chain (most meetings need these to either pull in, or out, visitors' bog-stricken cars); Brighton The Buzz 'n' Beach, and so on.
 
Right I just knew you'd have a take on this, but I do like it.

Nominations are now open for the unofficial TH submission to 'flowerpot men' consultants. We want the racecourses of the UK rebranding with appropriate pub or trendy nightspot names please.

e.g.

Market Rasen = The traffic and jam

or they could be more abstract

Cheltenham = 'The venue'

no thinking about it, "Gillespies" has more of ring (and truth) about it, or even "Dizzys"

Must get a Firkin in there somewhere
 
Last edited:
They haven't got their basic facts right. They say that roughly 10% of the British population goes racing at least once a year. The true figure is far less than that.

According to the BHA, total GB racecourse attendance in 2008 was 5,716,656. The population of GB is about 59 million, so attendance as a proportion of population is almost 10%. Fair enough. However, most of that figure will have been generated by people going regularly and clocking up multiple attendances.

The consultants say that one third of those who go racing are regular attenders, and two thirds go once a year. If the one third who are 'regulars' attend say three times a year on average - a conservative assumption, surely - their attendances will already exceed the once a year brigade and the proportion of the population attending at least once a year will be about 6%.

If the regulars go on average four times a year, then the percentage of the population going at least once a year is about 5%, and if the regulars go five times a year it drops to 4%.

One begins to see that racing is much more of a minority sport than the consultants suggest and that converting occasional racegoers into regulars would have a potentially much greater impact on attendances than expanding the once a year market, in the short term at least.
 
Grey said:
They haven't got their basic facts right. They say that roughly 10% of the British population goes racing at least once a year. The true figure is far less than that.

According to the BHA, total GB racecourse attendance in 2008 was 5,716,656. The population of GB is about 59 million, so attendance as a proportion of population is almost 10%. Fair enough. However, most of that figure will have been generated by people going regularly and clocking up multiple attendances.

The consultants say that one third of those who go racing are regular attenders, and two thirds go once a year. If the one third who are 'regulars' attend say three times a year on average - a conservative assumption, surely - their attendances will already exceed the once a year brigade and the proportion of the population attending at least once a year will be about 6%.

If the regulars go on average four times a year, then the percentage of the population going at least once a year is about 5%, and if the regulars go five times a year it drops to 4%.

One begins to see that racing is much more of a minority sport than the consultants suggest and that converting occasional racegoers into regulars would have a potentially much greater impact on attendances than expanding the once a year market, in the short term at least.
Click to expand...

You should offer your services to the BHA, I hear they pay consultants quite well!!
 
Grey said:
One begins to see that racing is much more of a minority sport than the consultants suggest and that converting occasional racegoers into regulars would have a potentially much greater impact on attendances than expanding the once a year market, in the short term at least.
Click to expand...

I`ve never got what minority sport actually is. If it`s based on attendance then every single sport in the country bar football is one.
 
Back
Top