The Power Of Parimutuel Interest
You couldn’t have got a more powerful encapsulation of the Asian Racing Conference theme than the sight of Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, Peter V’Landys and Aaron Morrison, the heads of racing in Hong Kong, New South Wales and Victoria, sharing the stage to kick the whole thing off. To use a boxing analogy, it was like having Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk buddying up, with Derek Chisora putting down the sparring mitts and joining a brief, back-tapping, group hug.
‘Be Connected, stride together’ was the mantra and there was not only an air of détente but also a sense of urgency that working together must be the way forward for all administrative and industry bodies.
Engelbrecht-Bresges’ opening remarks emphasised what any participant with eyes, ears and sufficient cognitive function knows, and that is that racing as a sport and industry is in trouble the world over, but he delivered it with authority. He highlighted it in numbers, speaking to the ‘softening’ of turnover leading to a higher rate of decline post-Covid, falling attendances everywhere, and a continuing loss of market share to sports betting (34 percent share in 2023 from 63 percent in 2020), illegal bookies, and other entertainments.
He had ‘industry fragmentation’ top of his list of four points that the industry must focus on, followed by ‘social acceptability,’ ‘growth of illegal betting,’ and ‘ageing customer base.’
“There are huge opportunities but we can unlock them only if we work together and act fast because our competition is growing every day,” Engelbrecht-Bresges said.
V’Landys was all too ready to back up what he called “the genius,” of the Hong Kong Jockey Club CEO and his World Pool concept, which is already doing its bit to unite the sport and industry globally via one big commingled pool (expect additions to the current 48 World Pool fixtures). No one was championing fixed odds bookmakers here.
“World Pool will keep struggling jurisdictions alive,” V’Landys said, then made a case for merging the totalisator in Australia into a unified super pool without state boundaries that would put money back into racing that is being lost to bookmakers, legal and illegal.
“I think we’ve got to go back as an industry and promote the tote, promote exotic bets, promote the trifectas … we’ve got so many exotic bets,” he said. “That’s where I think the industry in Australia should get together, it’s on the totalisator. Let’s get a strategy together, how do we get the tote back, how do we take back the migration that’s gone to fixed odds betting?”
But, while the Australian and Asian jurisdictions seem to be embracing at least the idea that urgent cooperation is needed, things are not as positive in the U.S. or Europe, prompting Engelbrecht-Bresges to say of the disconnected shambles of self-interest that is horse racing in Britain: “I won’t say it’s Mission Impossible, but even Tom Cruise cannot help you.”
Horse Aftercare To The Fore
Horse aftercare’s place at past conferences has felt like an unwanted guest of begrudged importance who had to be let in but was asked to sit in the corner. That has changed more recently and this time it received a good bit of the spotlight, and not before time.
The IFAR (International Forum for the Aftercare of Racehorses) held it’s own one-day conference using the same facilities, the day before the start of the three-day ARC, and the theme carried through with Engelbrecht-Bresges for one emphasising how vital it is for all jurisdictions to get it right from now on.
There was a lot of talk about ‘social licence,’ and ensuring horses have a visible and viable post-career pathway will be essential if the sport is to have a future in the face of ever-growing public apathy and opposition.
Illegal Betting Is Booming
It’s been a theme of ARC’s in the past decade that the illegal betting operators are booming at an alarming rate, all to horse racing’s detriment, and this one was no different on that front. What was emphasised this time was that the illegal operators are ahead of the game when it comes to technology, utilising mirror sites for example, marketing aggressively online, and expanding through cryptocurrency, which is an option not open to the legal operators.
The big fear now is that high taxation and over-regulation will crush the legitimate industry while the unregulated illegal market is essentially free to suck out every last dollar it can get.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club’s integrity and betting analyst Tom Chignell summed it up in saying: “One of the largest threats is that the illegal market becomes normalised for the average racing punter. We’re talking about the recreational market, we’re not looking at the high-end professional syndicate, who is dedicated to maximising their profit.
“There are a number of key factors driving this movement from the regulated market to the illegal market, or (people) stopping betting on racing all together. The illegal market is growing far greater in jurisdictions where there is the demand but not the supply, and supply is under threat by greater regulations and cost.”
A grim forecast particularly for Britain, again, where the government has introduced cripplingly tight checks designed to ensure bettors can afford to place the bets they want. Engelbrecht-Bresges called for better approaches everywhere to communicating racing’s case to regulators.
Racing Needs Rules Harmonisation
Whip rule inconsistency is a nonsense. Whether you want no strikes, limited strikes, or as many strikes as you feel you need, the wide disparity in the rules between different jurisdictions around the world is a problem. Those regulations were a prominent point of discussion on day one of the conference when top jockeys Christophe Lemaire and Yutaka Take shared their views on the increasingly controversial issue, which is wrapped up in the whole ‘social licence’ and horse welfare discussion.
Lemaire was particularly pointed in saying that the wide-ranging differences in rules about whip use, particularly how many times a jockey can strike a horse, is something most jockeys are not happy about.
This is a topic that would have been prominent in the thoughts of the stewards who met during their own conference the day before the ARC started and will convene again at the IFHA (International Federation of Horseracing Authorities) committee meeting in Paris before the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. In the World Pool era, harmonisation can’t come soon enough, but there’s work to do to get there.
Be Better At Telling The Story
It’s always interesting to hear the views of industry outsiders and Bob Langert, a corporate sustainability expert who helped turn around McDonalds’ bad press around environmental and animal welfare ethics, made it pretty plain that he’s no fan of the whip.
But he also said that it’s important for racing to understand critical voices, and also to ‘invite the wolf in’ to see and scrutinise the sport. He stressed though, that you don’t pander to the extreme elements, rather you need to win over the mass ‘middle,’ and you do that with transparency and good messaging.
Good story-telling is vital. That notion of doing a better job of telling racing’s stories through quality writing and production, and making those stories freely accessible, was a repeated theme during the conference.
