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Brian O'Connor

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Avoiding A Colditz Future

Jockey at the Curragh watching the English St. Leger on TV screenJockey at the Curragh watching the English St. Leger on TV screen
© Photo Healy Racing

Out of all the figures that emerged from a controversial Irish Derby perhaps the most significant was the 86,600 viewing figure for RTE’s coverage of the meeting. That represented less than fifteen per cent of the available audience. Even allowing for the World Cup, Wimbledon and other sporting alternatives on at the same time, it’s a sobering reminder of racing’s place on the sporting spectrum.

There remain some who believe racing is doing TV a favour: be in no doubt, it’s more the other way around. In the modern digital media world, if it isn’t on telly, it doesn’t count. Television pays, and gets to call the tune. And the tune is audience.

Sports, no matter what they are, are inherently valuable, with any number of virtues. Rowing for instance is a ball-breaking examination of body and spirit. But no one wants to watch it on telly. Racing’s good fortune is that it still has an audience. However a continuing and consistent presence on terrestrial television is hugely important in maintaining it.

Anyone believing that racing can survive any decrease in terrestrial coverage without significant impact needs to be disabused of that notion quickly. A less than fifteen per cent audience share will have bean-counters in Montrose coldly totting up profit and loss. Even without a World Cup, the Irish Derby got 17.5 per cent last year. Are those figures enough in the long-term?

The impact of Channel 4 rather than the BBC hosting top events like the Derby, the National and Royal Ascot has caused a lot of anxious soul-searching in the UK. Declining viewing figures even have Epsom considering a Saturday evening ‘off’ time for the Derby, a headline-grabbing symptom of a much bigger issue.

Racing retains a vital terrestrial presence still in the UK, something that also impacts directly on the sport here. But it is extensive sponsorship from the Maktoum family that makes it financially viable. In stark financial terms, sticking on ‘Colditz’ again makes a lot more sense. That might make an artificial market but racing’s self-interest is bound up in that artificiality. Once telly goes, you’re into show-jumping territory.

There were quibbles at how the Irish Derby ‘off’ time this year had to be switched to accommodate the World Cup. They are off-beam. Considering the non-event the big race turned out to be this time, if RTE tells the Curragh they want the Derby off at eleven in the morning next year, it might be time to set the alarm now. Because the figures are of a sort to get clocks ticking. This year’s figure was 86,600. Last year’s equivalent was just shy of 130,000. 2012’s figure was 175,000.

Telly is also vital in attracting sponsors, but the kerfuffle over the rebranding of the Stewards Cup at Goodwood is a reminder of how tracks can bend over too far sometimes for sponsors and lose sight of what attracts them in the first place. Racing’s history and prestige is worth a lot more than being discarded for tiny short-term game.

Such sponsorship own-goals are rare in Ireland where instead, if the grapevine is to be believed, spectacular ‘morkoting’ arrangements are available to businesses in return for comparatively little actual financial outlay. Tales of desultory sums changing hands in return for prominence might have to be taken with some salt, but there’s no doubt that generating sponsorship is a criteria by which tracks are judged. And when jobs are being judged by names on race-titles, the pressure to pony up results is automatically there, especially when the sponsorship cake has dwindled considerably from the boom times.

Most of all it might be worth recounting what one titan of industry from years ago told a then callow hack about value: namely if someone’s getting something cheap, they have little value in it, and the chances of successfully coming back to them for more business, and maybe even upping the price, are virtually nil. Giving the shop away simply means no shop in the end.

The reverberations over how to revitalise the Irish Derby rumble on with the consensus seemingly being that moving the race back a week is a good call, and one that will be worn in Britain because there isn’t an impact on Eclipse at Sandown. That looks a big assumption. Three year olds theoretically can run in both, and have done. It’s going back thirty five years, but Dickens Hill was runner up in the Curragh Derby and won the Eclipse a week later.

But even conceding that there might not be much of a clash in terms of runners, is it good that two such prestigious races might be run within hours of each other, with possible consequent impact in profile terms – those TV figures again. What about a simple logistical issue like high-profile jockeys getting double-booked and not being able to cover both?

We are supposed to be in an enlightened time of international cooperation. So is it too much to expect the Anglo-Irish powers to shuffle things around; maybe stage one race on a Saturday and one on a Sunday?

Racing on the Sabbath is always mundane in Britain, but imagine how a Sunday Eclipse would transform that thinking, and the race would get a significant profile boost into the bargain. Alternatively why couldn’t the Irish Derby go back to Sunday? The reasoning for moving it to Saturday was essentially a profile one, but that hardly seems to be working out too well.

If telly went for it, why not move it back. The Saturday’s hardly set in stone, and Sunday makes more sense on any number of levels. But whether it makes sense for telly is probably the most important factor of all.

Finally, Sea The Moon did plenty wrong in the German Derby. He looked a temperamental boyo, and going to the stands rail looked like giving into the inevitable rather than any tactical masterstroke on Soumillon’s part. But still, wow. Anyone believing there are no staying three year olds around better think again. This looks a serious colt. But in terms of the Arc, would you take single-figure prices about a horse that hangs left like that?