Leopardstown attracted solid crowds over the four days at Christmas© Photo Healy Racing
Leopardstown bucked the trend over Christmas with attendances over the four days up 6% compared to the pre-Covid numbers in 2019.
The high-class racing was obviously a contributing factor, but you’d have to wonder if there was something else at play. Leopardstown seems to have cracked the younger market, which has been the Holy Grail for all tracks in recent years, and if they can keep that going into 2023 they could continue to be an outlier among the racecourses in terms of attendances.
Racecourse attendances have been falling across the board in 2022. Overall it looks like attendances around the country will be down around 7% on 2019 numbers.
That 7% fall is only a guesstimate as most tracks don’t give attendance figures on a meeting by meeting basis and when they do they can often be taken with a pinch of salt.
Over the years I have seen official attendance figures for certain racecourses bear absolutely no resemblance to the amount of people that turned up on the day. I fondly remember the laughs we used to have in the Cork pressroom in the months after it was redeveloped. A huge crowd came to the opening day and not surprisingly it was heralded as a ‘record crowd.’ Over the following months that record attendance figure was bettered time and time again despite dwindling numbers turning up. It seemed as if the day’s attendance figure was already decided before the meeting started, and was invariably a few higher than the previous day.
Galway was traditionally the only racecourse where you could trust the numbers you were given.
Newly appointed Limerick Racecourse manager, Tom Rudd, must be scratching his head after his first Christmas Festival in charge. He totted up the attendance over the four days and arrived at a believable 17,500, and was rightly pleased with that turnout.
Unfortunately for Rudd the most recent pre-Covid figures for the same venue, over the same four days in 2019, was over 50% higher at close to 40,000.
Irrespective of the validity of the 2019 Limerick figure it is interesting to see that this Christmas the racecourse saw by far their biggest crowd on St Stephen’s Day. 8,000 people, which is almost 46% of the four day total, turned up on the first day at Limerick. Leopardstown on the other hand had a more even split across their four days with attendances of 15,797, 17,045, 16,031 and 11,601.
Of course Limerick had just a single Grade 1 race on their first day while Leopardstown had seven Grade 1 contests spread across their four days.
I’ve often wondered why there has to be such a concentration of major races at just a handful of tracks. Geographically, virtually all the Grade 1 and Group 1 contests in the year are located within a thirty mile radius of Dublin. For a sport that constantly promotes itself as a rural pursuit and talks up its economic benefit to the island as a whole much could be done to address this imbalance.
If one or two high quality or high value races were devised which could be rotated between some of the lesser tracks on an annual basis it could really give a targeted boost to different regions and cement the importance of the sport as a rural revenue generator.
Whatever about the divide between the big racecourses and the smaller ones, the chasm between the super-trainers and the rest grows wider day by day. Over the Christmas period all 8 Grade 1 races were won by three of the biggest trainers in the country - Willie Mullins 5, Gordon Elliott 2 and Joseph O’Brien 1.
In addition to winning all 8 Grade 1 races, the same stables hoovered up the vast majority of the place prize money in those contests as well.
Mullins and Elliott alone were responsible for 25 winners between them over the four days of Christmas. This equates to 40% of all the races run which is quite extraordinary when you consider that there were 13 races in which neither of them even had a runner.
