Champions Festival needs more than just a name change to develop wider public profile

The 10th Champions weekend starts on Saturday. It’s a milestone marked by a rebrand for Irish flat racing’s signature event. The action in Leopardstown and at the Curragh on Sunday is now the Irish Champions Festival. If the title’s different, the ambition’s the same. But is it being fulfilled?

Just like a decade ago the name of the game is profile. This is the sport’s ultimate shop window. It is Irish racing in its best bib and tucker demanding the world pay attention. And by the very best global racing standards what it has to offer measures up big-time.

Of the 16 races up for grabs, half a dozen are of the highest Group One standard. Saturday’s Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes consistently ranks among the top-rated contests anywhere in the world. There is €4.5 million in prize money available overall at two of the finest tracks on the planet.

In the magnificent triviality of thoroughbreds running fast from A to B it doesn’t get much better.

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This event legitimately ranks as the first leg of a stellar international autumn calendar that continues to Paris for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe before proceeding further afield to November’s Breeders’ Cup in Los Angeles.

That status is no mean achievement in a decade. In terms of global racing profile, the move to cram all the very best races into a single weekend has been a hit. Closer to home, though, the rebrand is a tacit admission of failure to enthuse wider domestic interest.

No doubt expensive marketing brains were engaged to crack the code of selling the best the game has to offer to new audiences. So, it’s bit of a damp squib to see the sum of their efforts being little more than a rework of the old Irish pitch of pinning the word festival to an event and getting the beer in.

It’s not that such a move doesn’t have winning form. Over decades the Galway festival has been built on creating a sense of event. Almost 26,000 people piled into Ballybrit for a single day’s action last month. That was for a quality of racing that pales in comparison to what’s on offer this weekend.

Contrast that tally to last year’s official combined weekend attendance of just over 17,000 at Leopardstown and the Curragh. It was a 28 per cent dip on the pre-pandemic equivalent in 2019. The inaugural Champions Weekend in 2014 had a return of 24,168 people.

Attendance figures are never a precise reflection of public engagement, but neither are they irrelevant in gauging popular appeal. Part of the original Champions Weekend brief was to combine the best of the sport with a sense of event that gets bodies through turnstiles. It hasn’t happened.

Quite why is a quandary that continues to baffle more than just Irish racing’s top brass.

Leopardstown is full at 20,000 and got half that a year ago. This is a track with a city of over million people on its doorstep. Less than 7,000 were at the Curragh in 2022 for one of the showpiece fixtures used to justify the track’s €81 million redevelopment. This is in the heart of Kildare’s Thoroughbred County.

It is reasonable to expect last year’s figures will improve on the back of an overall 7.6 per cent surge in overall attendance figures reported by Horse Racing Ireland for the first half of 2023. But that’s not going to have Leopardstown and the Curragh reaching for any ‘full house’ signs.

To compound things, the Irish Champions Festival has a car park draw in this weekend’s profile stakes.

Where it once had to contend with potential All-Ireland final replays, this time it is up against the Irish rugby team’s World Cup opener against Romania on Saturday afternoon while Sunday evening sees an Ireland-Netherlands football qualifier. There’s even the Irish Open golf in the mix.

In such a bulging diary it is fanciful to expect top billing in mainstream media, sections of which too often zero in only when something goes badly wrong. That there is plenty right with this weekend’s event only adds to a sense of thwarted ambition when it comes to selling it more widely.

Original fears about overwhelming Coolmore dominance haven’t been borne out. Aidan O’Brien is by far the most successful figure but not to the suffocating level initially feared by sceptics.

It was the French horse Almanzor that emerged victorious in a 2016 Champion Stakes that remains maybe the deepest quality race ever run in Ireland. Godolphin’s Pinatubo got ratings whirring in the National Stakes four years ago. A local syndicate won the Leger with Sonnyboyliston in 2021.

Structurally, the days would ideally be switched around. Having the most prestigious race featuring on Day One inevitably produces a whiff of anticlimax about Day Two. There’s also the reality that jump racing engages popular opinion more in this country.

Neither factor explains the misfire in piercing wider public consciousness more. In fact, the one sure thing about this weekend is that fixing that problem requires a lot more than just a name change.

Something for the Weekend

As so often before, Frankie Dettori is Saturday’s star attraction and could well pull off a record-equalling seventh Irish Champion Stakes success on the French raider Onesto (3.20.) Last year’s runner up on comes here fresh on the back of a Marois fourth over an inadequate trip. With question-marks over both Auguste Rodin and King Of Steel, the selection appeals at a general 8-1.

Valiant King (4.30) ran into Vauban on his last start and prior to that was unlucky to lose to Desert Hero at Royal Ascot. Irish Derby runner up Adelaide River, White Birch and Al Aasy have more obvious credential for the Paddy Power Stakes but underestimating the selection could be costly.