After 11 renewals it’s safe to say the Irish Champions Festival looks to have found its level in terms of popular appeal. Prizemoney of €5 million and some of the world’s best horses gets you an official attendance of 18,780. Tot it up and the public’s verdict largely seems to be ‘meh’.
It’s a dispiriting judgement for those of us in thrall to the very best flat racing has to offer. The sport doesn’t get much better than this. Saturday’s Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes, in particular, supplied a thrilling finish between some of the world’s highest-rated racehorses. Economics was a joy to hard-core fans, yet wider public appreciation was frugal.
The original Champions Weekend concept was to increase Irish flat racing’s profile, both internationally and on its own doorstep.
Doing that meant replicating the fashion for concentrating excellence into one major event, a shop window to the wider world of the best of Irish racing, akin to America’s Breeders’ Cup and the Arc in France. Every autumn Group One, along with other graded events and heavily boosted big handicaps, got crammed into a single weekend at the country’s top two racecourses.
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With a perfect slot just three weeks before Arc weekend, it kicked off an autumn bandwagon of major global racing dates that after Paris progresses to English Champions Day at Ascot before heading farther afield to the Breeders’ Cup, Melbourne, and Tokyo for the Japan Cup before winding up in Hong Kong in December.
That the Japanese star Shin Emperor ran third to Economics last week chimed with the Champions Festival’s international status. A horse that hadn’t run since finishing third in May’s Japanese Derby tested his credentials against Europe’s best in Foxrock and is now on course for a tilt at Arc glory in France.
How shrunk the elite global racing village is increasingly becoming was underlined by how Japan’s massive racing fan base could wager on the race directly through the hugely lucrative World Betting Pool. Other major racing jurisdictions around the world did the same. It more than ticked the box for putting Leopardstown to the forefront of world racing’s consciousness.
However, an official attendance of just over 10,000 was there to watch first-hand Economics beating Auguste Rodin and Shin Emperor. An official return of 8,645 was at the Curragh 24 hours later.
This is a country famed for racing. Leopardstown is on the edge of the capital with over a million people on its doorstep. The Curragh is less than an hour from Dublin, in the middle of Kildare, the self-titled “Thoroughbred County”. More than €81 million was spent on a spanking new facility at Irish racing’s HQ on the expectation that if it was built, they would come. But last weekend’s figures smack of apathy and a domestic box still unticked.
A glaring figure that originally helped propel momentum towards the Champions concept came in 2009. During a momentous three-year-old campaign, Sea The Stars, perhaps the finest racehorse Ireland has ever produced, made his one start here. Just 9,000 showed up at Leopardstown to watch him first-hand in the Champion Stakes.
It felt like a stark display of public indifference at the time. After more than a decade of concepts, boosted prize money, various bells and whistles, and even the last PR gasp of pinning “festival” to the title, the net gain last Saturday amounted to little more than a thousand extra through the gates. As dividends go it is hardly spectacular.
It underlines again how the quality of the actual sport is often only a marginal consideration in getting people to go racing. Much more important is a sense of “event”. More than 90,000 will go to next week’s Listowel Harvest festival. Nearly 120,000 went to Punchestown in the Spring. Much the same numbers were at Galway during the summer.
These are more rustic occasions than the ritzy Champions Festival. There might even be an element of elitist condescension towards them. But arguing that the pecking order is wonky is rather like a stand-up comedian informing a mute audience how they really should be cracking up at such a clever joke. People have a habit of making up their own minds about stuff.
They’ve certainly made their affections known about the Dublin Racing Festival. The Champions Festival’s National Hunt equivalent had double last Saturday’s crowd for its opening day alone at Leopardstown last February, highlighting again how the jumps seem to resonate much more in Ireland.
There have been calls for debate on how flat racing might expand its appeal. But more than a decade of evidence suggests the Champions Festival concept is no silver bullet. Strip away post-pandemic excuses and promotional complaints and the bottom line is how little the needle has moved.
Last weekend’s attendance was 23 per cent lower than 2014. Leopardstown’s crowd was barely above the one Sea The Stars raced in front of. More than 11,000 were at the tatty old Curragh a decade ago. The new facility that swallowed €45 million of public money got more than 20 per cent fewer than that last Sunday.
It underlines how enthusiasm for flat racing in this country has got a level and it’s proving very hard to budge it.
Something for the Weekend
It’s hardly original but the way KEILAH (4.20) won at Punchestown on Tuesday makes her easy to fancy off a 7lb penalty in a 10-furlong handicap at Navan on Saturday.
Earlier on the Navan card, veteran ONLY SPOOFING (2.35) s back to the course and distance where he has proved so effective in the past. Dropped to a mark of 74 for a sprint handicap, he can put some younger rivals in their place.
