5th June 2009 - Bill & Ben the Marketing Men - Brough Scott

There is actually something more seriously wrong with racing than needing to change “Brian” into “Ben” as suggested this week by the latest marketing suits to trouser six figures for stating the obvious. It is that nothing ever works when Capitalists try playing at Communism. Communists confront problems by forming committees. This latest wheeze has formed no less than seven of them. What’s more they are stuffed with solid citizens who all agree that what they should do is to meet and talk about everything. No they shouldn’t. To recycle one of the Fleet Street’s favourite headlines: “Stop this Farce now!”

It’s a nonsense. It won’t wash. As solutions go it’s as convincing as“The Kings New Clothes” in the fairy tale. Everyone is supposed to look on in admiring wonder when there isn’t actually anything there. Well, sorry folks, I am the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson film who sings “Look at the king, look at the king, he’s all together as naked as the day that he was born.”

Come on you committee men (and shamefully they are virtually all men), you all know perfectly well what the problems are in racing. They are the same as they have been for years only they are getting worse because no one does anything about them. They are, in one sentence, that racing is confused both in what it offers and how it is run. That was perfectly well expressed by our new friends on Monday, just as it was by the last bunch ten (?) years ago as well as the lot before that. The question is not what the problems are, it is whether you have any mechanism – bar forming committees - to act on them. It’s not about rebranding – it’s about slimming down and re-shaping. And now.

But something can come from this latest fiasco. When people realise their nakedness they are going to ask how on earth they have allowed guys as good and sensible as Paul Roy and Nick Coward, and indeed all of themselves, to get caught up in the whole thing. That’s when they will realise that another “ism” is eating away at the heart of the game. It’s called “Cannibalism”, and if the committee men don’t cede some power to a true capitalist executive structure the racing body is going to look very chewed indeed.

For everyone who looks at the situation for five minutes knows that racing offers three different activities; a social day out, a betting game and the “sport” of equine athletics. If you overindulge the first two you eat into the flesh of the third. Yet we have a situation where in their hunger for revenue racecourses blot out their core attraction with boozed up partygoers and bookmakers insist on wall-to-wall racing through which only an anorak can see the thread. Racecourses insist on competing head-to-head when there never was the audience. TV channels do exactly the same, and most newspapers now display racing as merely grids for the betting game with less actual written coverage than tennis or rugby league.

This is a postion which cannot and will not be tolerated by the people who really matter and who are notably absent in the great raft of new coffee and biscuit takers on whom, apparently, depends our future. These key people are the sports editors of national newspapers and the producers of network television, and the truth is that within five years, maybe within three, they will have changed the face of racing as we see it.

The worst case scenario is that it will go into satellite TV oblivion like showjumping and wrestling. But even the best case will see only major races on network TV and then on one channel not two, and newspaper coverage will be confined to just two meetings a day. What’s needed now is a combined executive, not committee, effort to maximize the opportunity of what, by necessity, will be a much clarified national vision of racing as a “sport” whilst absorbing the financial shock of doing without the “fast food” revenue which has got racing into its present bloated but ever greedier state.

Believe me, that is the best case scenario. Don’t start listening to siren voices who think we can somehow put millions on the viewing figures and hundreds of thousands through the gates. In the modern age we never did. What we must do is to use this debate to get real. British racing as a “sport”, a betting game and a great day out can still be a very successful enterprise. But, as with all capitalism, it will hurt first.

Only communists insist on keeping everything open. In five years time there will be a “Premiership” set of racecourses and horses and people into which the wider world will be invited to take interest. Below that there will be a “Championship” tier covered by one satellite channel and a specialist website. Below that there will be the British equivalent of Australia’s “bush tracks, popular locally but not something that is played out to the wider world.

The change will be enforced by a mixture of a TV agreement and bookmaker backing . It is not a new vision. I remember the late Simon Weatherby saying something similar back in the seventies and Greg Nicholls outlining it very specifically when he was trying to help Peter Savill wrestle the game forwards ten years ago. But it is a vision conceived out of real, direct knowledge of both the racing business and of the wider media interest. It has never worked so far because the assorted stake holders have preferred to hold on to their own, complain about the status quo, form new committees, and then ask the stupid, un-answerable question “who runs racing.”

Since he is by some margin the most impressive current operator on the planet, it is worth remembering what Barrack Obama said when challenged about the present financial crisis. “Some are to blame,” he said, “but all are responsible.” I doubt we will get the President to Epsom but we might use him to skewer the lie that communism and committees can ever be the answer.

What needs to happen, and again let’s confine it to one sentence, is for the principal parties to accept this three tiered vision and then to have the executive courage to implement it. Sure it will be difficult but where’s the alternative? Hands on heart committee boys (and girl) and tell me you really think that by spending millions on marketing you will somehow transform an increasingly overblown and therefore unattractive body into a more interesting and slim one. You know what ought to be done. Be honest about it. This is up to us. Not Bill and Ben.