It will be a long anxious wait until the true extent of the damage inflicted by the plague on horse racing in the UK can be anywhere near accurately assessed. A large scale drop-off in involvement by sponsors will be amongst the most feared after effects and right now the omens are not looking good.
There was a time when racing, on a higher pedestal than it is now, had the luxury to be precious over its most treasured flat races. It was as recently as the 1980's when the Derby had a sponsor for the first time in its long lived history which came quite fittingly through Ever Ready, whose chairman was Sir Gordon White, the owner of several high class horses including Hardgreen, who was Michael Stoute's second ever runner in the Epsom race when sixth in 1979.
With all of the classics having collectively several sponsors for many years now no one bats an eyelid, it's not an issue and never would be provided the sponsor's name supports the original race title as opposed to distorting it. It now should be only a matter of time before sponsors are permitted to tag their brand names on to traditional race titles at Royal Ascot.
This time will probably arrive when Queen Elizabeth 11 is with us no longer, leaving a moderner, less relevant generation of her family, a couple of whom have shown more enthusiasm for an apparently famous rapper called 'Fifty Cent' than for horse racing.
Racing may well soon be going down the beggars can't be chooses path as it is becoming increasingly likely that top level sponsorship will become harder to procure than at any time in recent history - the St Leger, the oldest classic of them all, currently has no sponsor, and the biggest wake up call was the announcement that Investec would be ceasing its link with both the Derby and Oaks with immediate effect.
The fact that William Hill made the disclosure back in February that their sponsorship of the Doncaster classic would cease renders the move free from any Covid 19 impact assessment. Owing to the events of the past few months is is easy to lose sense of the time line in some areas and to overlook that a financial crisis was building up in the sport long before the plague hit.
It will be revealing to see the figures for the planned total sponsorship for 2021 as there is going to be a considerable downturn. I was browsing through a copy of the May 1976 edition Pacemaker & the Horseman from my collection which are gems of magazines - not available in any online archive. As well as finding a poster of Abba hidden away inside, I also came across an article penned by Michael Thompson - Noel, headed " In the Gift Horse's Mouth - Some Facts and Figures on Sponsorship ".
Digesting the figures makes one realise how much racing in the UK has fallen in status since an era which in reality is not really that long ago. From the numbers available, it was estimated that £11 million was spent on sports sponsorship during 1976, with £1.2 million going towards racing making it number two in the sponsorship league, with only the sponsors true glitz sport of motor racing ahead of it.
Over twice as much sponsors money was spent on UK horse racing than football, while the ratio over cricket was seven to one. Step forward to the modern era and it is dispiriting how many league divisions racing here has fallen below soccer - if truth be told these two sports are unlikely to be playing in the same division ever again.
In 2016 one of the leading economic consultancy firms, Frontier Economics carried out one of the most forensic analysises ever undertaken of the financial workings of horse racing in the UK, which they produced for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They estimated that during 2014 the total prize money available was £123 million - the biggest contributors being just under £47 million from the Horse Race Betting Levy Board, £41 million from racecourses, £20 million from owners, and nearly £14 million from sponsors.
To put into context this sponsorship amount - during the same year Manchester United alone received annual sponsorship in the region of £170 million. Admittedly, away from prize money jockeys and stables often have sponsors but the sums amount to little in the grand scheme of things - I would imagine hard grafting journeyman riders come cheap, a car along with the odd thermal coat bunged in here and there.
The most pressing concern in horse race sponsorship is the distinct possibility that the aforementioned state of affairs with three of the classics presently having no sponsor is more than just a coincidental blip. This could even lead to some of the most powerful operations who have cross continent influence in the sport re - prioritising their global interests.
You only have to observe the sustained pattern in which top quality stallions have been shuttling to Australia for the Southern Hemisphere breeding season. While you can always pick out past examples to argue this has been the case for many years it must be noted that Danehill made his name as a stalllion initially through shuttling as opposed to establishing himself in Europe first. And both Galileo and Dubawi shuttled before anyone could predict the heady levels they would rise to.
What we have now in American Pharaoh and Justify, are the only two US triple crown victors since Affirmed in 1978, who Coolmore have gone in heavily on in the hope that they will lead the line for them when Galileo has gone. The fact they are shuttling from this early stage between Kentucky and Australia is a testament to the spread of their global strength and along with the Maktoums, leave themselves with the option of shifting the core of their operations.
Many will say that just as much focus should be placed on the vast number of single race sponsors, some one off, who will for a relatively small outlay put a name to a low grade race. Accumutavely this group contribute greatly to the sport in the lower, congested areas of the pyramid, but for all the events whose title celebrates a wedding, anniversary, retirement or passing, the sport desperately needs to maintain the prestige of its shop window events if UK racing is to maintain the recognised position of being at least the equal in quality to anywhere else on the globe.
image from Wikimedia
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