A winter's day in a deep and (not so) dark March

It's been a mighty week.  I love weather, and it's great when weather moves from the back to the front pages - just as it is on the rare occasions when racing makes the same journey.  It has definitely done so this week, which is a particularly fine achievement as the ongoing Brexit debacle has thrown up some particularly mighty moments over the past couple of days.  But the weather has been king.  It started off merely very cold, and Tuesday was a smashing day: subzero throughout, but bone-dry and glorious.

The snow moved in during the night going into Wednesday, and we've been having more of it since then.  The temperature has remained subzero throughout.  Riding out yesterday was straightforward (and enjoyable, as the later pictures suggest) and we had a totally normal, albeit snow-covered, morning; but I decided to err on the side of caution today and will do so again tomorrow.  And possibly Saturday too.  We'll see.  Underfoot conditions are now potentially treacherous; accidents happen easily enough without one inviting them in.

Even though we haven't taken any horses out today, I still had plenty to do in the stable during the morning.  Thus I couldn't make it to the BHA roadshow at the racecourse, which was a shame.  It would have been interesting and I would have liked to be there, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I wouldn't have felt comfortable leaving things undone here to attend.  There are some things which, when they come up, have to take priority over one's daily duties, but it would have been wrong to put my attending the BHA roadshow into that category.  However, I'll do my bit here instead, as the next few (I hope that I can make it reasonably concise) paragraphs will show.

I read a tweet earlier in the week by Daniel Kubler who highlighted the claim, made at one of the earlier roadshows, that "45% of our income comes from the betting customer directly or indirectly".  I hadn't given this much thought until Daniel queried it, but this makes no sense.  I suppose that it boils down to semantics, and one could dispute what "our" means.  And what "income" means.  But I would read this as 'racing's' income, and would regard racing's income as the money paid into the sport to keep the show on the road, money which is then redistributed.  Is this right?

Money paid in by the betting customer, directly or indirectly, would be the levy, the subscriptions, both commercial and private, to the TV channels, and the fee paid by on-course bookmakers to the racecourses.  Have I missed anything?  I wouldn't put racegoers' admission fees into this category, nor the money which racegoers spend at the races.  Racegoers and punters have to be put into separate categories.  There is no requirement nowadays to go the races to have a bet, nor to have a bet if one goes to the races.  Paying to attend a sporting fixture and having a bet (whether when there or elsewhere) are separate things.  So, aside from punters' contributions, we have racegoers' contributions.  And we have sponsors' contributions.

And then we have owners' contributions.  If we assume that racegoers and sponsors together put in the better part of 10% of the sport's income (or more) then we are saying that owners' collective contributions come to no more than punters' collective contributions.  Is that so?  I find it very hard to believe.  I don't know what the levy plus the picture-payments plus the bookmakers' admission fees come to (I probably should; but I don't) but what I will do is make a stab at totting up what owners put in.  Then we can see if we think that comes to roughly what the betting customer puts in.

Training fees vary hugely.  My fees are £40 per day.  There will be people charging a bit less, and there will be people charging double.  It also varies from horse to horse and trainer to trainer how many months a year the horse spends in full training (being out of work obviously takes the monthly cost down significantly) but we possibly could estimate that owners on average pay £15,000 basic training fees per horse per year.  I have it in my head that there are something like 16,000 horses in training in Great Britain.  So that's owners putting in around £240 million in training fees.  Then we can add in farriers' fees, maybe £600 per horse per year.  That's another £9.6 million.

Vets' fees?  How long is a piece of string.  One would hope that, say, half the horses in training only have their compulsory annual 'flu vaccination at a cost of around £35 (more than half the horses in this stable would come into that category) but some trainers use vets more (a lot more) than is necessary; and with some horses, hopefully a minority, it becomes necessary to run up veterinary bills of several thousand pounds in a year.  Since the start of last year two horses in this stable have had to have live-saving surgery.  That wasn't optional, and it cost several thousand pounds in each case.  So we might say that the average horse has £400 of veterinary expenses per year.  That's £6.4 million (and is a very conservative estimate).

Then we have the owners' contribution to prize money, ie every entry fee (ie a fee for every entry bar those which subsequently end up with the horse eliminated or with racing abandoned).  For most races that only comes to a few hundred pounds.  For some really valuable races, that comes to a few hundred thousand pounds.  Are there around 10,000 races per year?  What is the average entry fee?  How many entries on average per race?  What does that come to?  God only knows. But a fortune.  Then we have jockeys' fees.  How many runners if we have 10,000 races?  100,000 runners?  The jockey's fee (including the contribution which the owner has to make towards the jockey's insurance premium) is £186.14 National Hunt and £136.35 Flat.  If there are 70,000 Flat runners and 30,000 jumps runners, that's about £15 million.

And we have the cost of taking the horses to the races (ie the transport charge and the staff's expenses and overtime).  How many runners did we decide there were per year?  100,000 or so?  Raceday charges vary hugely, and not just according to how far the race is from home.  We do it as inexpensively as possible.  (I pay £120 to hire the box for the day and then drive it myself, but on top of that £120 there is the cost of the diesel and whatever expenses/overtime I pay to whomever comes with me, assuming that someone does.  So that's going to be in excess of £200, even keeping it to a minimum).  But there will be other trainers who will do it on a much grander scale, and might charge four or five times what I would charge for the journey.  How many tens of millions do we add on for taking the horses to the races?

Then we have Weatherbys' charges.  Weatherbys seem to charge £30.50 per entry.  How many hundreds of thousands of entries did we decide that there are per year?   And there are sundry other charges made by Weatherbys.  It is several hundred pounds to register a syndicate.  You have to pay to renew various registrations, eg colours, each year.  And there are the charges for naming the horse etc., etc., etc.  Total?  Again, God only knows.  Quite a lot of hundreds of pounds of Weatherbys' charges per horse per year.

Then we have the cost of buying the horses (which we should view as the total spent on horses in the year by owners collectively minus the total realised by owners by selling horses during the year.  In other words, one might say the capital depreciation of the horses.  I know that some horses appreciate in value, the occasional ones by massive amounts, but the vast majority depreciate significantly).  And we should throw in the cost of breeding the horse, if the owner is an owner/breeder.  That can be roughly summed up as (assuming that the horse goes into training as an autumn yearling) one and a half years' cost of rearing the horse and one and a half years' cost of keeping the dam (on the basis that the mare might have two foals in three years).

But not just that, of course.  The owner/breeder will also have faced the cost of the nomination (rangeing from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred thousand pounds) plus the associated (and significant) veterinary costs.  And the costs of taking the mare to the stallion, possibly several times.  In total, how many hundreds of millions are we talking about in this category?  And, possibly, the four-figure cost of entering the yearling in a sale, getting him ready and then taking him there, and then not getting a bid (or seeing him/her fail to reach his/her reserve).  Again, God only knows, but one could spend three years doing a PhD thesis and come up with a fair estimation.  I've heard of PhDs being dished out on the back of theses considerably less worthwhile than that.

What does that all come to?  A fortune.  This fortune should, of course, be reduced by the 78% (approximately) of the prize money pool which goes to owners.  (We have, of course, already taken into account the owners' collective return from selling horses).  That takes it down substantially - even if, at the same time, it is worth recognising that if one had a large field for a low-grade National Hunt race, the total of the jockeys' fees for the race would be less than the total prize money received by the owners in the race.  Sobering thought. 

What have I left off?  Probably a few things - but this isn't my PhD thesis; this is just my few brief(ish) ruminations prompted by Daniel Kubler's (@KublerRacing) thought-provoking tweet and Patrick Whitton's (@Blanewater) response: "Afraid they (ie those running racing) never really recognised it fully, Dan. Yet the owners' contribution to UK racing currently amounts to over £1 billion a year. Dwarfs everything else".  Food for thought.  And one of the thoughts it has prompted in me is that Patrick is right to say how overlooked the owners' contributions usually are (which is why there's no harm in my making a ham-fisted attempt to tally them up and publicise them).

It has also made me reflect how lucky we are at last to have someone, ie Nick Rust, at the helm of the BHA who is arguably uniquely placed to hold a realistic overview of all of the contributing parties, having worked at every level of the betting industry and having had a long-standing and significant racehorse ownership involvement.  He has already shown, by putting so much effort into ensuring that prize money increases are directed as far as possible to the lower levels, that he recognises the importance of trying to direct a better return to the general body of owners in general rather than to the elite few rich enough (or, very occasionally, lucky enough) to own the best horses.

With all this political pontification, I probably should have just gone to the seminar!  But if I had done that instead of writing this nonsense, not only would I have skipped my morning's duties in the stable (I only started to write this once morning stables had finished, but I had no say in the start-time of the seminar) but I also would not have given myself the opportunity to put up a few of the photographs which I took at the end of last week and the early days of this one (very cold, dry) and then on Wednesday, ie yesterday (very cold, increasing amounts of snow as the day went on).  And that's the main thing.  I'm more proud of my photographs than of my words.