Life is all about perspective. I used to believe that rugby was invented by William Webb Ellis, the schoolboy who picked up and ran with a football. But only until I heard an ex-England international explain that it wasn’t Webb Ellis at all who deserved the credit but Dalrymple, the guy who ran after him, wrestled him to the ground and said, ‘Give us our effing ball back.’
I used to think, too, that if a racetrack put on first-class races with decent prizes, top trainers would send good jockeys along with talented mounts and we would all enjoy good sport. That is no longer enough. Faced with increasing competition for the leisure dollar and falling revenues from the levy on bookmakers’ profits, reflected in poorer prizes for the owners we depend on to keep the sport going, racing is currently having to reinvent its appeal in the effort to put more bums on seats and maximise revenue streams.
It is not an impossible task. Take a client to a football match and you both have to shut up for 90 minutes while the game is played. Go racing with your customers and there is constant interchange: ‘How did yours do in the last?’ ‘What do you fancy for the next?’ You don’t have to explain to the uninitiated how the power-play works, the difference between a ruck and a maul or why the ref’s whistle has blown for offside. Who gets past the post first is a simple concept and the minor intricacies of betting are surely not uncommunicable to a generation which uses its mobile phones to do everything from taking granddad’s birthday photo to talking a bush dentist through an up-country heart op.
Ladies’ Days are key to the new marketing and at Newbury on Saturday, amid a gulp or two, I saw the world to come, even if one well-seasoned trainer was seen stumping off to the car park muttering, ‘If this is the future, then give me the past.’ On a day of iffy weather which might in the past have brought 8,000 punters to the course, managing director Stephen Higgins and his team attracted over 30,000 racegoers, a hefty majority of them female. Admittedly as well as the horses they could look forward to Westlife playing afterwards. There was a holiday in Florida to be won for the best outfit and other fashion prizes given by bei cappelli and Angela Knight Lingerie. (The only other time I remember lingerie featuring on a racecourse was at the West Country track where a woman rider split her breeches jumping the first fence and the other jockeys then generously let her make the running until they were over the last.)
Only five years ago at Newbury I remember my son being refused entry because he wasn’t wearing a tie. How marketing changes customs. Given the bum-hugging mini-dresses sported by many of the young ladies on Saturday, it was 3–1 on they weren’t wearing anything else at all, but that hadn’t bothered any decorum-conscious doorman. Nor that several had discarded their overly fashionable shoes by the fifth race. Joining the lengthy lines for the Tote windows was tricky without getting a rakish fascinator stuffed up your nostrils and it was the same at the food stands. Not for these lunching ladies the rocket salad with parmesan shavings. As the rows of quivering thighs on the steps of the Dubai Duty Free stand confirmed, these girls liked their hamburgers with chips and downed their lager in pints.
But what did the first-time ladies make of the excellent racing? Praise the Lord, they seemed to be involved, partly because Richard Hughes won the first on Attracted to You, a name which appealed, and partly because Frankie Dettori won two races in Godolphin’s blue, including a clever front-running effort on Shakespearean. ‘He liked the cut in the ground. He’s got big feet,’ said Frankie. ‘When I kicked I put the race to bed.’ Some of the camera-clicking girls on the weighing-room steps would clearly have liked him to do the same with them.
While we are on the serious business, Jeremy Noseda’s Sans Frontières ran a nice prep race for a possible tilt at the Melbourne Cup, and Godolphin’s first winner Janood, despite running freely to begin with, looks like an improving horse to stick with.
Winners like those two did not draw the kind of numbers you would normally see around the winners’ enclosure. But Newbury did all it could to ensure that some of the first-time females return with frequent ‘masterclasses’ explaining the betting and other racing ‘ins and outs’. I hope they will be back. We need them.
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