This article titled “Jockey Club turn profit of £8.6m and tip £2.7m back into prize money” was written by Greg Wood, for The Guardian on Monday 6th June 2011 23.15 UTCThe Jockey Club, racing’s largest commercial group, will publish annual results on Tuesday that suggest its 14-strong portfolio of racecourses managed to weather the economic turmoil of 2010. The club showed a net profit of £8.6m on turnover of £138m and is committed to increasing its contribution to prize money for 2011 by £2.7m to a record £15.7m.
The club also reduced its debts by £11.6m following several years of significant investment in facilities at its tracks, raising the prospect that a major redevelopment at Cheltenham, where the annual festival makes a significant contribution to the group’s profits, will be approved within the next three years.
“That is absolutely the next major project for the Jockey Club in terms of investment,” Scott Bowers, the club’s spokesman, said on Monday. “It’s not something that’s going to happen tomorrow because we have to finalise the details and ensure that the funding is in place. It’s something for maybe the next three or five years but it could be at the early end of that scale.
“What we can guarantee is that, whenever we make money, we will put it back into racing. We had already announced what we would be putting into prize-money in 2011 but this [£2.7m] represents an extra bit on top of that.”
The club also reported that its Racing Welfare charity saw a 34% rise in the number of people seeking its assistance in 2010 at a time when donations, particularly from corporate sources, were “significantly reduced”. “Racing Welfare costs money and they’re really struggling at the moment in terms of fund-raising,” Bowers said. “That’s also a really important part of our group and we need to make sure that the money is there to support it.”
The Jockey Club’s racecourses are a key component of Racecourse Media Group, which manages the media rights of 31 tracks in all and owns the Racing UK satellite channel. Subscriptions to Racing UK, which costs £20 for TV viewers and £10 online, rose by 4,000 in 2010 to 41,000, while RMG’s overall profit rose to a record £9m.
The success of musical events in boosting racecourse attendance also continued in 2010. Club racecourses hosted 23 evening meetings with post-race concerts, selling more than 250,000 tickets, and will increase the total to 31 meetings in 2011, with acts including Sir Tom Jones, Boyzone and Scissor Sisters.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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Exposing and punishing cheats brings rewards to the Turf
The fortnight between the Craven and Greenham meetings and Guineas weekend at Newmarket is generally a time to weigh up the form for the first Classics of the season. With Frankel now accounting for 60% of the 2,000 Guineas market, though, attention has had to be diverted elsewhere. Now everyone is playing a different game, called Guess The Jockeys.
There is such a pall of smoke emerging from the British Horseracing Authority’s security department that there has to be a fire in their somewhere, and there seems little doubt that several riders – and, presumably, one or more Betfair clients – will be charged with serious offences under the anti-corruption rules in the (relatively) near future. But beyond those directly involved on either side of the investigation, no one knows for sure who they are, and so the rumours are flying.
As yet, even the bookmaker Paddy Power has stopped short of actually pricing it up, though given that firm’s cheery disregard for good taste in the past, it can’t be ruled out altogether. But names have been appearing on internet forums for days, which is likely to extend into weeks before, or until, charges are actually laid against those concerned.
It is hardly surprising, given that speculation is fundamental to racing, though it does mean that if the much-bandied figure of five jockeys is correct, at least twice as many have had their names unfairly slandered already. And as long as everyone is trying to turn faces into mugshots, there is little time to think about the implications for the sport as a whole.
One seems to be taken as read: it will be More Bad News For Racing, of the kind for which it is already “bracing itself” in dozens of kneejerk intros. And in the short term, that may be so. Cheats and crooks are never going to be good for racing’s image. But in the longer term?
In general, if the police catch a house-breaker it tends to be seen as a positive reflection on the police rather than a sign that the society which produced the burglar is irredeemably corrupt from top to bottom.
When it comes to racing, though, the reverse often seems to be true, yet for as long as the wider world has a crime rate, racing will have one too. Corrupting influences will never be eradicated from the turf entirely, only minimised, and investigating, charging and punishing the cheats is an essential part of the process.
On that basis, punishment is as significant as the crime itself, and with the entry-level penalty for serious corruption of the sport now raised – albeit only recently and belatedly – to an eight-year ban, any jockeys found guilty of deliberately stopping a horse can kiss their careers goodbye. The message is unlikely to be lost on their colleagues, either. Seminars to tell riders that Betfair is not as anonymous as it might seem are all very well, but nothing stresses the point like a familiar face in the weighing room that suddenly isn’t there.
Beyond that, it will be up to individual punters to decide whether they still have sufficient trust in racing’s integrity to carry on using it as a betting medium. Some may listen to the angry, anonymous punters on the Betfair forum who claim that they have been cheated every time they back a loser, and that the sport is rotten to the core.
But others will see that some cheats have been cleared from the system, and that their fellow jockeys have been warned that if they follow the same path, the authorities have the power to catch and ruin them.
Discovering that jockeys are on the take will never be a cause for celebration, but that does not mean it is an unrelieved disaster either, whatever some of the headlines might say as this story develops and concludes.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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