I WAS asked recently what advice I would give to racing regarding promoting the sport to a new audience, and my response was that the only way to do this was to put the horse first in any marketing and promotion of the sport. This seems such an obvious and almost trite observation that you would think it wouldn’t merit mentioning, but so much of what has been done to promote racing in the recent past has missed the real selling point.

One reason for this is the assumption that what is desirable for racecourses is desirable for the sport, but while tracks need to maximise crowds, and then to ensure those crowds spend money to boost their profits, the initiatives which work best for this model, beer, betting and bands, are not the things which set racing apart as a leisure activity; quite the opposite, in fact. The more racing tries to homogenise the experience so that a lads’ day at the races is largely indistinguishable from a lads’ day at any other event, the more it loses its identity.