WHAT a bonus it was to have British Champions Day run on decent flat racing ground this year. So often we’re left to ponder what horses might cope best with testing ground on Ascot’s flat finale card, rather than which runner has the most ability, but a sound surface played a big role in making the meeting thoroughly enjoyable from a form perspective.
Frequently an afternoon of shocks, this time the results appeared far more orthodox too. Ombudsman laid down the law in the main event, Talk Of New York stuck his hand up to be considered the front runner in the mile division for 2027 and Almeraq virtually cemented his European champion sprinter status with a powerful finishing effort. Wins for Minnie Hauk and Night In Vegas came at single-figure prices too, with the only absolute boilover of the day coming in the Long Distance Cup, as Mount Atlas edged out Queenstown for a 33/1 upset. It all stacked up nicely for the most part.
Favourable results for punters add to the racegoing experience, but this was a card with an unmistakable youthful feel on the ground. It cannot be underestimated how the presence of young racegoers drove this raceday, having been in attendance last Saturday at Ascot.
When the topic of attracting crowds to Ireland’s premier flat meetings continues to be a topic for debate, there must be a fair deal that other courses can take from the success of Ascot’s Qatar Racing-backed fixture.
First things first, the crowd figure came in at 32,140 - up 3% on the 2025 figure and only just shy of the record 32,348 when Frankel signed off his career with a win in 2012. It was a lively atmosphere from start to finish.
According to Ascot’s director of racing, Nick Smith, 10,000 of the overall crowd last weekend attended under the Invades banner. The sports, media and events company has been to the fore of boosting attendances with student-backed days at racecourses, describing itself as “combining the excitement of live sport with the energy of music to create unforgettable, affordable experiences for the next generation of fans”.
Since launching in 2019, Invades has sold more than 600,000 day party tickets to 18-24-year-olds. The organisation clearly knows how to bring a youthful crowd to the sport and a similar implementation of those skills more widely on these shores would be welcome to the likes of the Irish Champions Festival, which officially drew 11,516 to Leopardstown and 8,801 to the Curragh this year.
Some of Ascot’s youthful crowd came under the Club26 umbrella too, a free-to-join group for 18 to 26-year-olds who can “access discounted tickets to all Group 1 flat fixtures throughout the summer and many more race meetings”. Club 26 members could purchase Queen Anne Enclosure tickets at an early bird rate of just £10 for British Champions Day. Now that is value for money.
Pleasing the demographic
From an on-course entertainment point of view, the presence of DJs Sigma in a large marquee after racing seemed to be a fair draw as well. The duo have 2.4 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone (their top track has more than 223 million streams), so it was a booking that surely ticked the box for many in the younger demographic.
On another level, it was an excellent move to host the first pony race at Ascot before the senior action got underway. The Qatar Racing Pony Racing Championship welcomed 11 runners and young riders, and an off time of less than an hour before the opening two-year-old race slotted in perfectly.
The young pony riders were present in the guard of honour before Billy Loughnane’s champion jockey presentation, with the first four home in the pony championship being presented with winning trophies and meeting Queen Camilla. Again, it all added to the sense that this was a day with youth to the fore.
It was also impossible to miss the racing demonstrations (including Tom Marquand on a simulator) before the card got underway, and there were ample options for food and drink around the track to give the event a premium feel.
“It is unashamedly a next generation raceday,” Smith told the Racing Post. “There were 10,000 people there with Invades, under the Club 26 banner, and you just look at them on the course and they are having the best time. They come and they embrace the fact that it’s Ascot.
“They all dress up, and walking down the high street in the morning you just thought this day is completely different to any other day. But there’s also 20,000 people there who are older than them, so it certainly doesn’t frighten away the more established audience.
“It’s fantastic and just goes to show there is a new audience for racing and only Champions Day really demonstrates that quite so visually… These things take an awful long time to embed themselves in the psyche of the racing audience,”
Rome wasn’t built in a day. British Champions Day has been in existence since 2011, and Saturday was what Smith hailed as when the meeting “came of age”. Radical change to the structure of our crowds at marquee Irish flat days will not happen overnight.
The success of Ascot last Saturday, however - as well as the booming Everest crowds down under on the same day - suggests leaning heavily into the next generation of racegoers may well be the way to go. It could be racing’s safest bet.
NATURALLY enough, the news of a Willie Mullins-trained Grade 1 runner testing positive for a banned substance hit the headlines last week following the publication of a British Horseracing Authority (BHA) hearing notice.
A combined total penalty of £1,100 tells you this wasn’t an offence on the higher end of the scale by any means, but was there not a far more alarming element of this case that got little airtime, relative to the ‘Cheltenham Festival runner-up fails drug test’ snapshot?
It emerged in the BHA’s investigations that Cheltenham Racecourse were unable to provide the relevant CCTV footage due to a failure to retain the footage of stables used by horses racing at the Cheltenham Festival this year. According to British racecourse regulations: “Images must be kept for a minimum of 60 days… Racecourses are required to keep secure the digital recording system.” In this instance, the yard where Final Demand was stabled in the days leading up to the race had CCTV “temporarily installed, using an external third-party supplier”.
The saga took a turn when this supplier “proved elusive” and did not respond to several attempts to make arrangements to meet with the BHA investigations team to supply the footage. A response finally came on July 2nd when it was confirmed the hard drive containing the footage had been “misplaced”.
Now, the BHA hearing noted that the absence of CCTV “should not be overstated” in this case, given the most likely explanation for the positive test “is that a low dose of mepivacaine entered the horse very close to the time of sampling”.
However, it is simply nowhere near good enough that the premier event in National Hunt racing - the most high-profile week in the sport’s calendar, with colossal sums at stake - had no CCTV footage available when needed in this area. It is an embarrassing episode for the authorities.
Unsatisfactory outcome
The panel was content with the likely reasoning for the positive test, but what if we were much more in doubt about the source? Access to the CCTV footage could have been crucial to getting to the bottom of finding why an 11/4 shot tested positive in a Cheltenham Grade 1.
The BHA opted for a £5,000 fine on the racecourse. Yes, a third-party supplier let the track down, but it isn’t a massive price to pay in the venue’s wider finances when the consequences could have been so much bigger. It will not meaningfully impact the bottom line of their balance sheet.
In different circumstances, it’s not all that long ago since the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board came under heavy fire for being without CCTV at Tramore after the Charles Byrnes-trained Viking Hoard ‘nobbling’ case. There were more glaring failures then, but Cheltenham appears to have gotten away quite lightly here to avoid coming under major wider scrutiny. It was a pretty lamentable segment.