This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The six-race card at Bath on 3 July would normally, like much of the racing there, be memorable only to anyone looking at the form book. Low-level horses competing at a low-level track for low-level prize money (a total of £40,000 on offer for the entire card).

Bad as the pittance paid to connections might be, with most races offering just the £2,983 minimum the British Horseracing Authority allows to be paid to winners, it’s not remotely unusual. The Brighton meeting the day before offered £34,000 overall. No race paid more than that minimum of £2,983.

Given the costs involved in owning a horse — at least £25,000 a year in training fees before you even think about vet bills, entries and transport, let alone the actual purchase price of a horse — you basically have to be mad to get involved.

This has gone on for years. But it’s not just owners who are being fleeced. On 3 July, Flutter, the parent company of Paddy Power and Sky Bet, acted. For the first time ever, it refused to offer prices on a British race meeting. If you wanted to bet on a runner at Bath, you had to find another bookie.

Everything British racing comes into contact with is ruined by it

Flutter’s concern was only indirectly over prize money; its focus was on media rights payments: “Total media rights payments from operators stand at more than double that of the horserace betting levy — the industry’s direct funding mechanism — this at a time when the funding of the sport remains a critical item of debate.” It’s difficult to sympathise with any bookmaker, but the gist of the message resonates — Flutter is fed up paying a fortune (the most recent levy scheme raised £105 million) for dross.

It’s not just at the lower end of racing that prize money is such a running sore. It is the anti-Midas touch of British racing: everything it comes into contact with is ruined by it, including the supposed crown jewels of the sport.

This year’s Royal Ascot was worth more than £10 million for the first time — a figure trumpeted loudly as if it was something to boast about. However, racing’s flagship meeting had not a single runner from Japan or Hong Kong, and the US horses that came were decidedly useless. True, Australian sprinter Asfoora cleaned up in the King Charles III Stakes, but the point stands.

Nick Smith, Ascot’s director of racing, has repeatedly warned that the prize money differential with Japan and Hong Kong, along with the rise of the Middle Eastern programmes (now including Saudi Arabia), means there is no longer any real reason for international owners to send their best horses to Ascot or any other British meeting.

Dubai, the new Saudi meetings and the Breeders’ Cup are pulling far away from British racing as hosts of global championships, and we are not even standing still.

Prize money for the Queen Elizabeth II Cup and Champions Mile in Hong Kong is increasing in 2025 by 9 and 11 per cent to £4m and £2.4m respectively. Their British equivalents, Ascot’s Prince of Wales Stakes and the Queen Anne Stakes, are worth £1m and £750,000.

In 2018, the last year in which a serious comparison was made, average prize money per race in Britain was below Ireland, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, France and the United States. It has gotten worse since then. The Racing Post recently looked at prize money over the past 25 years. Last year there was an overall reduction of seven per cent in total prize-money — the largest inflation-adjusted fall in more than a decade (other than the Covid year of 2020). Jump racing fell by 13.4 per cent, with the flat down by 3.6 per cent. Prize money overall has fallen by 3.9 per cent in real terms over the last five years.

That only tells part of the story, however. Over this period the fixture list grew from 1,203 fixtures in 2000 to 1,500 in 2008, where it has more or less remained. That means less money to go round more races.

Racing is fighting to survive on many levels. But unless it fixes this most basic issue — properly rewarding those who supply the raw material — we might as well all pack up and go home now.