Racing in revolt
The sport continues along a path towards its collapse, spurning any opportunity for reform
This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
I’ve written many times in these pages about the various crises in horse racing, any one of which could prove disastrous, and all of which constitute an existential threat to the sport. It’s been depressing to see racing continue along a path heading towards its collapse, spurning any opportunity for reform.
The latest was the resignation earlier this year of Lord Allen as chair of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA). He had taken the job on the understanding — indeed the promise — that there was an appetite for the major reforms to the governance and structure of racing that is needed, including a new, fully independent board of directors.
Fat chance. He found, as has every one of his predecessors and as does anyone who spends even a moment looking at racing’s problems, that the vested interests hold sway. A man of his word, he resigned after six months.
The problems are manifold. The most obvious and immediate is not of racing’s own making, although its response to it has been pathetic. I refer to the attack on gambling, both from the Gambling Commission with its insistence on affordability checks which demand punters hand over personal information such as P60s and payslips, which are driving people into the hands of illegal bookies, and the wider medicalisation of gambling as some sort of public health issue.
That connects with the threat to funding, to which the betting levy contributed £108 million last year. The illegal bookies pay not a penny towards racing, so the levy is itself under threat.
Add to this the fall in the number of horses in training, from 23,357 in 2020 to 21,798 last year, as well as the decline in ownership, in large part due to the state of prize money. It is fearsomely expensive to own a horse, and although syndicates help, they still require a substantial outlay (you will not get a meaningful share in a horse for less than £1,000 a month in training fees, plus the initial purchase price which can be many multiples of that). Prize money should help offset that, but average prize money per race in Britain is below Ireland, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, France and the US. As for the big races, we are pygmies.
But in the end all roads lead back to one issue.
Not only is there too much racing, there is too much rubbish racing. There are 1,458 race meetings scheduled in 2026, almost the same as the 1,460 in 2025. This dissipates the “product” and destroys any chance of restoring racing’s health.
Some courses — essentially many of the 16 owned by Arc, including the six all-weather courses — exist on a diet of low quality, high quantity racing designed to drive betting revenue. But there is zero chance of reform of the fixture list because of the structure of the BHA, which gives the owners of these “churn” courses seats on its board via the Racecourse Association (RCA).
Which brings us to an event in May which could, finally, prove the catalyst to real change. Ascot, one of those courses which most definitely does not exist on low quality, high quantity racing, announced that it would resign from the RCA. This matters because of the RCA’s two seats on the board of the BHA. The RCA’s internal proceedings are governed by one course, one vote, which means that because there are far more low-quality courses, the RCA acts as a barrier to change.
After Lord Allen’s resignation, Ascot demanded that the RCA bring forward proposals to change its own governance. It didn’t, so Ascot said it would leave in December. Now that one major course has gone, the likelihood is that more will follow such as those owned by the Jockey Club — including Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Newmarket — and three independent tracks — Newbury, York and Goodwood. If this happens it will destroy the RCA’s claim to represent racecourses, and thus present the BHA itself with a legitimacy crisis.
It is anyone’s guess what will now happen. The push has always been to avoid a split in racing between what would be a de facto Champions League of courses and races, and the rest. But I think that horror of a split is itself the problem. What happens on the “churn” course and what happens at Ascot, Cheltenham and their like should be seen as two different branches of the sport, with different needs and — this is the river many refuse to cross — different governance, with the bigger courses negotiating new media rights deals.
Arc and other smaller courses have every right to their own model, and racing as a whole still needs the revenue from their churn, although a reduced and rationalised fixture list will mean some courses will likely prove unsustainable. But the bigger, better courses need the freedom to be able to refine and bolster what they offer.
There needs to be cooperation between the two different arms of the sport, with common licensing and such like. But racing needs also to be realistic. It is a doomed sport at the moment, despite its popularity and the huge success of Cheltenham and Royal Ascot.
Doomed by external factors such as attacks on betting, and doomed by its own internal issues. Both need to be tackled, but dealing with one will be useless without dealing with the other.
