Around about this time each year the British horseracing industry braces itself for one of its most important rituals. At stake is the money - the levy - to be paid to the people who organise and administer racing by the people whose bookmaking businesses make millions from their efforts.
The dance goes something like this: both the bookies and the racing industry, represented by the British Horseracing Association, think of an amount they need or are willing to pay, and it is left to the wisdom of The Horseracing Betting Levy Board to come up with a compromise with each side lobbying hard for its own agenda.
At the time of writing, no agreement had been reached so it had not been possible to finalise the fixture for next year’s racing. Now for most sports governing bodies that would be a worrying situation, but in racing it’s pretty much the norm. After all, horseracing has been around a long time and although the ‘Sport of Kings’ has seen its crown slip more than a few times, it has never quite been lost.
But one senses that change is in the air around British racing right now and according to Simon Bazalgette, CEO of The Jockey Club, that’s because there simply has to be. Racing may be an historic sport, shot through with tradition and a vocabulary all of its own, but it has to exist in a fast-changing world where it is competing like never before with other forms of sport, other types of entertainment and other opportunities for gambling.
Bazalgette is a media man who confesses to have been only an occasional follower of the turf before parachuting in to help sort out the mess that was the sport’s television offering back in 2004. He brought with him a wealth of practical media experience which had seen him head the media consulting department at KPMG before joining Music Choice, a joint venture between Time Warner, Sony, BSkyB and Motorola to deliver the world’s first digital satellite music operation.
“At the time racing’s television deal with At The Races had collapsed and the courses were anxious to create their own media company,” he explains. The result was the formation of Racecourse Media Group with Bazalgette at the helm as executive chairman, a role in which he launched Racing UK - the consumer satellite channel - and Turf TV, the specialist operation which supplies coverage of racing to more than 8,000 bookmakers.
He had clearly made his mark and his appointment as the first CEO of The Jockey Club in 2008.was hugely significant for the organisation and racing in general. “I think they realised that they needed to be led by somebody who understood the world of media,” Bazalgette says pragmatically.
It certainly marked a realisation that racing had to evolve and that it was now, significantly, if not primarily, a media business which needed to meet the expectations of its stakeholders and be positioned to take advantage of fresh developments and opportunities in a fast-moving field.
So what exactly is The Jockey Club today? While it still, in many ways, has the sweet smell of its 260-year history, it is not the stuffy gentle folk’s club of popular imagining. Neither is it an organisation for jockeys, nor is it racing’s regulatory body - a role it relinquished to the British Horseracing Authority some three years ago.
Instead it is a multi-faceted operation involved in the events, property and bloodstock industries. Its four divisions - Jockey Club Racecourses (of which there are 14), Jockey Club Estates (which owns swathes of training land around Newmarket and Lambourn, two of UK racing’s major centres), The National Stud (a bloodstock business), and Racing Welfare (its charitable arm) - employ over 550 full-time staff and collectively had a turnover of £100 million in 2009.
Established by Royal Charter it remains focused on its objective to use its influence and assets to further the interests of horseracing and any profit it makes is re-invested in the sport. All of which means that Simon Bazalgette has one of the most interesting jobs in sport, anywhere in the world.
He sees The Jockey Clubs through the eyes of the experienced businessman: “It is really very much like a public company. We have shareholders on the board overseeing four operating divisions. It had never really been run like that before.” And ask what the essential nature of the business is and the surprising reply is “turnaround.”
“We now have a great group of businesses but many of them, including the National Stud and a number of the racecourses - including Cheltenham, Aintree and more recently Exeter - were failing before they became part of The Jockey Club.”
For the full interview see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published August 1.
