We’re not halfway through October and there have been 17 race meetings this month already. There are 29 more to come, starting today with a double-header at Downpatrick and Dundalk. Not a lot usually happens quality wise in Ireland in October. Limerick’s Munster National is about as big as it gets. But rather than any lull, October has the most fixtures of the year, resulting in whopper measures of fast-food betting fodder and no doubt as to who’s lovin’ it.
More races mean more betting turnover for the gambling firms. Their new media rights deal with Ireland’s racecourses means the tracks have a stake in staging as many races as possible – with as many runners as possible – to help generate their own dividend. Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) gets a slice of the action, including with its own handful of tracks, so there is a self-perpetuating gluttonous logic to heaping things up. Betting has become Irish racing’s Golden Arches.
There is a cost though, as there usually is with too much of a good thing. Today’s fixtures are the second of four double-headers in a row. There were half-a-dozen double headers in a row up to last Monday. There are 16 of them in all this month. A single blank day is pencilled in for the 29th. With top-quality action finished on the flat, and the first Grade One of the National Hunt season still weeks away, the emphasis is firmly on filler.
For those operating at racing’s coalface it is easy to get jaded at the prospect of such a crammed schedule. Those travelling professional boots on the ground that keep the racing circus going will be stretched before the month is out. How much of the racing public will feel similarly stupefied at such a relentless timetable is something that seems to be well down HRI’s priority list.
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It’s not hard to see why. The betting shop industry might be on the slide, but supplying pictures to it – in Britain in particular – is still a major earner. Streaming pictures online has turned Ireland’s racecourses into vast green studios capable of generating at least seven grand per race, with more on top depending on the betting turnover generated by them. It’s a straightforward tot that leaves racing very aware of how its bread is buttered on the betting side.
It is hardly a win-win, however. The same logic that has HRI planning for 430 fixtures by 2028 makes for a slippery slope the sport could find difficult to get off. As it is, the 2025 fixture list is unchanged on 395 meetings because the horse population remains at 2023 levels. That suggests a sector already hard-pressed to keep up with the demand for runners to service the desired race numbers that keep all that betting moolah rolling in.
The sport’s finances revolve around expanding the fixture list, but it’s a policy with the potential for problems down the line.
There have been long time warning signs from Britain, where the financial imperative to run more and more races to generate more and more betting turnover has been the thin end of the wedge in terms of maintaining a fundamentally attractive product. Even some of the top trainers there, those who might be expected to relish endless opportunities, have called for the number of fixtures to be radically cut.
Although HRI policy for years has been to try and keep both quality control and field sizes up as much as possible, there is an apparent contradiction in ambitions to increase the fixture list even more. If this month’s bloated programme is a sign of things to come, it won’t be any kind of treat. Eight race cards with major gaps between races to service TV scheduling might be a lucrative earner but it risks turning Irish racing into little more than another gambling outlet.
What can already be argued with some vigour is that Irish racing’s old dismissive attitude towards other countries such as France and the US, and the supposed lack of atmosphere at venues there, really should get binned. With so many ‘industry’ fixtures now all but barren of footfall, apart from people paid to be there, Ireland is as homogenous as anywhere else in its racing now mostly being a TV game for betting business.
It makes for a big earner, but it’s a model that comes with the real danger of much of the sport getting perceived as just another gaming option offered up by ravenous gambling conglomerates. That’s a risky image considering the reputational whiff increasingly attached to the gambling industry. It also reduces competition to just numbers, with little regard for the standards of the horses doing the running.
That makes for a delicate balancing act that HRI must try and pull off over the coming years. This month’s distended fixture list is certainly filling, but any good menu should take account of how less can sometimes be more.
Something for the Weekend
Newmarket’s ‘Future Champions’ action will get billed in terms of Ballydoyle V Godolphin, but the unbeaten Anna Swan (3.35) could upset them all in today’s Group One Fillies Mile. The Sir Michael Stoute trained juvenile could hardly have won easier on soft ground at Newbury and it looks significant she takes on this top-flight option rather than an easier alternative.
A drop back to seven furlongs on easy ground might help Final Curtain (5.30) make it third time lucky in the Naas finale tomorrow. Johnny Murtagh’s charge faded in the closing stages after racing prominently behind Dublin over a mile at Listowel last month.
