In July this year, the Jockey Club reached one of the most momentous decisions in its 255-year history. Since it was the summer holiday season, not all of the club’s members were on home soil to lament or acknowledge what was happening. Most racing enthusiasts’ heads were turned by the prospect of the best horses in Europe meeting at Deauville. But still, on July 31, the Jockey Club agreed to hand over the final vestiges of responsibility for running the sport in Britain. Centuries of tradition came to an unceremonious halt.
Turf types saw this as the inevitable decline of a feudal relic and the start of a long overdue modernisation. What had begun in the 18th century as a social racing club for the landed gentry had inadvertently become the governing authority for a multimillion-pound global sport in the 21st. Racing – and betting – had changed, while many felt the Jockey Club had not.
For all its assets (14 courses including Epsom Downs, Newmarket, Cheltenham, Aintree – and, at the last count, 5,000 acres of prime training and bloodstock land in and around the racing villages of Newmarket and Lambourn), the Jockey Club endured harsh criticism over the years, even derision. Racehorse owners, trainers and jockeys – the sport’s professionals – felt that the JC stewards, or voluntary referees, were amateurs: brandy-quaffing, self-perpetuating oligarchs and estate-owning nice-but-dims. In the words of John Francome, a former champion jockey who felt he was unjustly suspended, JC officials were “Cabbage Patch dolls”.
Whether these accusations were fair or not, aspects of the Jockey Club were undeniably at odds with the contemporary racing world. As the sport became increasingly commercial, the club’s then senior steward – or chairman – the Duke of Devonshire (at the time, Lord “Stoker” Hartington) accepted that the complexities of horseracing were beyond the governance of a self-elected club. In 1993, he led a vote to transfer much of its power to the new British Horseracing Board, a body representing the sport’s professional and commercial stakeholders. Today, Devonshire says: “We had been told by government in no uncertain terms that if racing wanted any sort of financial assistance, or even an ear, the sport could not be run by a completely undemocratic process.”
The Jockey Club remained in charge of licensing and regulation – until this year, that is. In July, it relinquished these last responsibilities to the British Horseracing Authority (which had succeeded the BHB).
So, now that it is stripped of power, what will it do next? Does a meaningful role remain within racing for the Jockey Club? Martin Broughton, chairman of British Airways, long-standing racehorse owner-breeder and the BHB’s last chairman, says: “The Jockey Club has always been under-recognised for taking decisions based on what is best for horseracing. Alongside the BHB, the Jockey Club was involved but not responsible, the worst of both worlds.” He adds: “What’s more, as both regulator and racecourse owner, the Jockey Club was in a difficult place. Now, there should be clarity, a sense of release, even.”
Indeed, the Jockey Club is not quite ready to be put out to pasture. It still enjoys incredible privilege; the Queen is patron, and other high-ranking royals – Princess Anne, Prince Philip and Prince Charles – are members. Some of the most affluent people in the world are also in the club (such as Saudi Arabia’s Prince Khalid bin Abdullah) and City grandees have continued to follow past captains of industry such as the late Sir Freddie Laker in accepting membership.
The accounts are healthy, too. In 2006, Jockey Club Racecourses (JCR), which owns the club’s venues, increased its turnover to £79.9m, up 6.9 per cent on the previous 12 months. So, the Jockey Club seems in rude financial health. But can the institution adapt to its new place in racing’s grand order?
Julian Richmond-Watson, the Jockey Club’s current senior steward, was unavailable to discuss its plans the first time I tried to arrange a meeting. Instead, a message came back saying that he had a shooting engagement prior to his 60th birthday.
Eventually, Richmond-Watson and I sit down at the Jockey Club offices on Shaftesbury Avenue, London. Equine art that once blended comfortably with the grandeur of the club’s previous residence at Portman Square hangs a little uneasily on the walls of this more contemporary building, the club’s home since 2004. Richmond-Watson wears a grey, trimmed tank top over a shirt and tie – racing uniform for the old school, but hardly a modern-day business fashion statement. We take tea and biscuits in the senior steward’s ground-floor room. The final handover to the BHA this summer did not create “friction” within the club, he says. A better word to describe members’ feelings about letting go would be “reluctance”. “This really began four years ago,” he confides, recalling a conversation with the then sports minister, Richard Caborn. “It was clear the way the wind was blowing. Of the 120 members, there was a group who wanted to look forward rather than back, and think about the Jockey Club in 10 years’ time.”
This group, the modernisers, lobbied remaining “backwoodsmen” – those who saw any loss of power as a threat to civilisation, alongside the bans on smoking and hunting – to convince them that the Jockey Club could not regulate racing and own racecourses at the same time. The tensions between modern business concerns and the old school are recalled crisply by the Duke of Devonshire, today keeper of his family’s Chatsworth House and estate in the Peak District. “Before he died, Lord Weinstock [owner/breeder, Jockey Club member and chairman of General Electric Company] was terrifying at meetings. He’d often be late. I’d think, ‘good, he hasn’t made it,’ and begin. Then he would appear. I never knew what he would come up with. He would find something in the meeting’s papers. A sort of to and fro between me and him – a very clever man – would follow in front of the members. I remember he once questioned my use of the phrase ‘racing industry’. He said it was not an industry but a sport. In the end we agreed on a compromise; sport run in a business-like way.”
Devonshire says 90 per cent of members were “very happy”, to hand over power to the British Horseracing Board in 1993. “As for the 10 per cent against, well, at the meeting when we voted on the transfer of power the then Lord Manton and other elder statesmen of the membership spoke. Manton was very pragmatic. We thought a bit about whether the Jockey Club could, itself, change, then agreed to divest ourselves of everything except regulation.”
Now that regulation has passed to the British Horseracing Authority, Richmond-Watson is completely free to sharpen the Jockey Club’s concentration on business. A successful land management and property dealer, he says that the Jockey Club will now actively seek new members who can help to groom its assets. Already recruited are the likes of Dido Harding, a Tesco development director, who will become a director at J. Sainsbury in March; Ian Good, chairman of the whisky industry’s Robertson Trust; and Jeff Smith, chairman of aircraft interiors manufacturer AIM Group. “Of new members now elected, more than half are chosen for their business acumen,” Richmond-Watson says. (Members join by invitation and are subsequently confirmed by a club vote.)
Slowly the atmosphere at Jockey Club meetings, usually attended by more than half the membership, should evolve away from being, in Harding’s own words, akin to a session in the House of Lords. (This is perhaps no great surprise, considering the overlap in membership. The Jockey Club boasts two viscounts, three dukes, two earls, five lords, a marquess and 11 knights among its membership.) “I am trying to make proceedings less formal,” Richmond-Watson says. “You used to have to say, ‘Lords, ladies and gentlemen’.”
And yet Chris Collins, non-executive chairman of Old Mutual and a Jockey Club member since 1972, recalls the time when it was just “Lords and gentlemen”, since there were no female members. “Back in the 1970s, the Duke of Norfolk [a past senior steward] would have an idea, there would be a debate, then it would go through.”
There are still hangovers from the aristocratic past. Harding, herself an amateur rider and owner of the 1998 Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Cool Dawn, says that Jockey Club Racecourses’ boardroom protocol is “no different to Tesco; first-name terms, frank exchanges”. But, in a striking anachronism, JCR directors such as Harding must still report on plans for the venues to officials such as the Jockey Club Keeper of the Match Book, whose original role was to record the outcome of races between aristocrats’ horses. Such traditions are important, Richmond-Watson maintains. “Glue that holds the Jockey Club together,” he insists.
At Cheltenham, flanked by the heaving crowds, jockeys power 500kg of horseflesh up the hill, with the Gold Cup awaiting the winner at the top. The rabble of the public enclosure is to the left, to the right a grandstand packed with race-goers from the royals down. This, and race meetings at the other Jockey Club-owned venues, attract a mix from the most affluent members of society to those seeking a lucky strike with the bookmakers. Trilby and tweed mixes with all sorts of man-made fibres before the different classes retreat to separate enclosures.
The enduring appeal of these events is partly inspired by the belief that British racing is the premier version of the sport in the world. This is the natural order of things to most Jockey Club members, who consider it worth the investment to perpetuate this image abroad. “In 50 years’ time it should be the Chinese still taking an interest in racing here and not the other way round,” Harding says. To make sure this happens, the Jockey Club has extensive business plans. It is already sitting pretty to negotiate lucrative domestic broadcast deals, thanks to its portfolio of 14 racetracks, which between them host four of the five English Classic fixtures and the Cheltenham Festival. Action from the club’s racetracks dominates Racing UK, a subscription satellite channel set up in 2004 to screen racing from the majority of Britain’s 59 venues.
The Jockey Club is also the majority shareholder in Racecourse Media Services, which with a scheme called Turf TV earns £6,500 a year from any of Britain’s 7,000-plus betting shops that take live pictures.
Chris Collins, JCR chairman, has spent more than 35 years in business. A City stalwart, he was first elected to the club for his prowess in the saddle. Though he declines to put it in more dramatic terms, he acknowledges that the Jockey Club’s assets and interests are in transition. “I can see further progress in exploiting media values of the JCR product,” he says. Simon Bazalgette, executive chairman of Racing UK and brother of Peter (famous for Endemol Television and Big Brother), is more bullish. He predicts a doubling of profits at Racing UK from £1.5m in 2006 to £3m in 2008.
Here, the Jockey Club’s critics raise their heads again. The institution is not publicly accountable to those who sustain it, namely racegoers and betting-shop clients. The broadcaster John McCririck, to many the face of British horseracing (the “voice of racing”, Sir Peter O’Sullevan, is a Jockey Club member), believes that financial accounts for racecourses such as Cheltenham and Aintree should be published. “Turf TV is also just another way of extracting money from the racing public to give to owners and breeders as prize money,” he says.
A counterpoint to this argument is that while the Jockey Club owns – Ascot apart – racing’s greatest cash-cow venues, income generated by them stays within the sport under the terms of the Royal Charter. “The Jockey Club is only a non-profit making body in the sense of profits distribution,” Martin Broughton notes. None of the profits go directly to members, and from 2002 to 2006 the Jockey Club reinvested more than £120m in capital projects enhancing JCR venues.
Broughton praises the Jockey Club’s acquisition policy, which in the past two years included the purchase of Exeter racecourse and 500 acres of land at Lambourn. In addition, the National Stud in Newmarket, which showcases industry best practice, comes under the Jockey Club umbrella shortly. “The Jockey Club has invested heavily and may be more stretched for some time, which is a good thing,” he says. There is potential growth in renting out racecourses for conferences and other events, which in 2006 generated turnover of £12.1m for JCR. Devonshire, also Her Majesty’s Representative at Ascot (head of the board of trustees which manages the venue for the Queen) warns however that this may not be a commercial “golden goose”.
For a quantum leap in profits, the Jockey Club has instead turned to betting collaborations. This year, Racing UK entered into a partnership with the Racing Post newspaper, under which a share of profits from live internet betting on Racingpost.co.uk returns to the racecourses where the action is taking place. If there is a golden goose for JCR, this type of collaboration is it.
Critics of the Jockey Club maintain that the institution, for all its devolution of power, is an outdated relic that casts an antiquated shadow on the sport. Dido Harding acknowledges that it will be extremely hard to change this perception. “The Jockey Club handed over responsibility for the disciplinary process this summer but some trainers and jockeys I know still blame us for decisions since.”
Some suggest mischievously that the Jockey Club’s final handover for disciplinary matters fell conveniently ahead of the start in September of a high-profile trial at London’s Old Bailey. Former champion jockey Kieren Fallon and five others stood accused of defrauding customers of Betfair, the online betting exchange. The case against the defendants collapsed last week. When we met, the trial was still ongoing, and Richmond-Watson said: “I cannot second guess the outcome of a trial. But if anyone is found guilty then the authorities have done their job. Then again, if all are cleared racing is not as bad as some think.”
Although the trial is now over, the Jockey Club still faces a potential recruitment issue. The more it evolves into a business, the harder it may be to persuade the great and the good to contribute their time when they have their own empires to run. “I don’t know what is round the corner,” Richmond-Watson admitted. “But I think we are ready. Although, of course, something always crops up to surprise you.”
Perhaps unwittingly, the Duke of Devonshire sums up the difficulties the ruling classes have with change. “There is always a reluctance to accept it,” he reflects. “Like seat belts, when they were made compulsory. We all knew they were safer.” The master of Chatsworth pauses. “Still a bloody nuisance, mind.”