Richest Day in British Horse Racing Attracts Queen, $47 Million in Betting
A new horse race event created to promote the sport in the U.K. has attracted more than 30 million pounds ($47 million) in bets, rivaled only by the final day at Royal Ascot in U.K. flat racing, organizers said.
The inaugural British Champions Day will be held at Ascot on Oct. 15, and Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to attend. The event is the climax in flat racing’s newly created British Champions Series.
Racing Enterprises Ltd., the commercial arm of U.K. horseracing, last year created the series in order to broaden racing’s appeal to younger audiences amid competition from rival sports. Sponsored by the Qatar International Investment & Projects Development Holding Co., the Champions Day has prize money of 3 million pounds, making it the richest event in the country’s racing history.
“The Champions Day will rival a Royal Ascot day for turnover across the betting industry,” Kate Miller, head of racing at U.K. bookmaker William Hill Plc (WMH), said in an interview. “The new series creates a huge event to round off the season. That in itself will create interest throughout the flat racing season, which runs from April to October.”
It’s taken three years to get the event up and running. A similar plan, called the 10 million-pound Sovereign Series, was announced in 2008 but never came to fruition. Instead, the idea evolved into the 35-event Champions Series, as the industry asked for more racing categories to be included.
“We may not always agree on the best way of doing it, but it is a game changer,” Simon Bazalgette, chief executive officer of the Jockey Club, said in an interview.
Champion?
The Jockey Club is the largest commercial group in British racing, and manages and operates 14 racecourses including Epsom Downs and Aintree. It is also the largest shareholder in the British Champions Series.
“The first thing anybody asks about any sport that you get them engaged with is: ‘who’s the best of the best and what’s the championship?’” Bazalgette said. “We created an umbrella that creates that dynamic with a big climax that we didn’t have for the flat season before.”
Frankel, rated the best racehorse in the world by the British Horseracing Authority, will take part in the Champions Day. The unbeaten three-year-old colt is the 2-7 favorite at William Hill to win the one-mile Qipco Queen Elizabeth II stakes. That means a successful $7 bet on the horse owned by Prince Khalid Abdullah, a member of the Saudi royal family, would return $2 plus the original stake.
Drastic
“The good thing is that racing didn’t have to do something as drastic as other sports have had to do,” Bazalgette said. “Rugby went professional and created a Premier League. Cricket did Twenty/20. But we had to do something. We had to get people to realize that if we didn’t do something we would just be going into a steady decline.”
So far, the series - which started in April in Newmarket - have been a success, the Jockey Club said.
The series’ broadcasting rights have been sold to 75 countries, while terrestrial television audiences have jumped by one-third this year compared to 2010. Attendances at the 27 days that have made up the new series prior to Champions Day at Ascot have risen 7 percent to 688,279 spectators.
Attendance across the whole of the British racing program rose by 3.9 percent this year, even though the U.K. economy has struggled to recover from recession and unemployment has risen to the highest level since 1996.
“People love their racing,” Bazalgette said. “People like to do something that takes their mind off the day-to-day. Whether that’s going to concerts, or going to sports. Racing seems to have an attraction that keeps people coming.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Danielle Rossingh on the London sports desk at drossingh@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Elser at celser@bloomberg.net
Rate this Page