Extra 3 days for Billy Lee after appealing 7 day ban © Photo Healy Racing
The Irish Derby’s dramatic attendance dip has produced quite a lot of twisting and turning which ordinarily could be categorised as little more than movement for its own sake. After all, when the real racecourse money is in telly, the gate becomes mostly superfluous. Except there’s €65 million going into redeveloping the Curragh, largely on the ‘Field Of Dreams’ hope that if you build it, they will come. And the evidence rather starkly suggests that they won’t.
First of all, attendance figures are a crude way of measuring racing’s overall health, especially when there are often credibility gaps in terms of on the figures being provided. Anecdotal estimates as to actual crowd sizes can vary spectacularly from the official and not all of it can be dismissed as coming from arch-sceptics who reckon even jockeys, officials and those officials’ pets are counted as footfall when it suits those with a stake in ‘bigging’ such figures.
Any real estimation of who is actually prepared to pay to go racing in Ireland - as distinct from going on freebies or winking at friendly white-coats - depends on precisely totting up gate receipts rather than arbitrarily counting bodies.
But in Derby terms it’s hard to believe that tinkering around with the start-time, or the day it is run on, or the date, or squeezing it in to some GAA-free timeslot so that the Curragh supposedly becomes a more enticing prospect for the general public, isn’t essentially a fiddly exercise within an industry in which the really meaningful figures relate to TV money, the prizemoney impact of betting tax, and, of course, those vital government top-ups.
The question of how many go racing in order to contribute to atmosphere and applaud on cue is a relatively trivial subject to most racing professionals, perhaps because they realise that actual racing is largely irrelevant in relation to attendances.
The upcoming Galway festival is the most glaring example of that. Massive crowds will flock to Ballybrit not because of the racing but because it is an event, a self-perpetuating occasion in which horses are, mostly, an irrelevance for most of those thronged in.
And the reality is that in terms of profile and media coverage, there’s no escaping competition of other sports during the height of summer. If the Derby organisers want a clear profile field to themselves their best option might be to move to Christmas when racing gets centre stage largely because there’s little else happening at that time of year!
In hard bottom-line terms the reality is that the global digital gambling market is likely to mean attendance figures increasingly becoming both a local and academic exercise. They are already something of a cherry on top of the overall financial cake for most tracks. Which is probably just as well since building doesn’t seem likely to bring people through the gates in their droves anytime soon.
The real issues around attendances aren’t the sort of financial ones that concentrate administrative minds but instead hopelessly intangible stuff such as sentiment and goodwill and encouraging the young to view the sport as something to be enjoyed rather than endured while trailing parents who’ve actually gone to the trouble of paying to go racing: in short, planting positive seeds for the future, just the sort of vague flakey stuff that doesn’t show up on balance sheets.
It isn’t just ordinary punters who often get to feel like being taken for suckers on our racecourses. Some stable staff were apparently cheesed off at Bellewstown in relation to a notably pricey menu — including €2.50 for a soft-drink can - which appears to have attracted quite a lot of attention on social media.
An awful lot of pious air gets expended on the importance of stable staff to the industry and the grim nature of their work conditions sometimes during long hours. But clearly they’re not immune either from the hard economic school of supply and demand which funnily enough is often the creed of those who own the horses they look after.
The Turf Club’s Referrals Committee was busy last week with two horses losing races for positive drug tests, including the Dermot Weld trained Va Pensiero which lost a race at Dundalk after a positive test for lidocaine which is often used in stables as a local anaesthetic.
Weld reported he was completely puzzled by the test result. A Turf Club official said the trainer’s medicines record at his stables were meticulously kept and could find no evidence that lidocaine had ever been administered to a Weld trained horse. Yet given what they had to work with, the Referrals Committee had little alternative but to fine Weld E1,000 which understandably left him unhappy but equally understandably in the circumstances left him with little room to appeal. It looked a case of duty done all round but with no clear outcome as what actually happened which is frustrating for all concerned.
Given Weld’s profile, it’s perhaps understandable that Billy Lee’s appeal against a seven day ban for careless riding at Limerick got comparatively overlooked in the process but given recent history it was surely significant that the jockey actually got his ban extended to ten days.
The panel decided the incident, which resulted in another jockey being unseated, was a bad case of careless riding. They also noted Lee had a poor record and taking everything into account actually increased the suspension. In short they actually backed up the actions of racecourse stewards. Given some of the stuff that has gone on, and the almost obligatory appeal that comes with any penalty these days, such a move indicated a welcome level of Referrals Committee backbone for a change.
And finally there is some unofficial unease that an original 120 rating assigned to US Army Ranger after his Epsom Derby second to Harzand has been officially upped to 121 by the BHA due to Ryan Moore weighing in 1lb overweight after the race. Questions of precedent apparently arise out of it. The much less technical question some of us would ask is how much more of a stink such a big race overweight might have caused if it had involved Joseph O’Brien?
