Betfair Official Blog

Protectionism and the free market (or why owners can't have it both ways!)

Our yard insider challenges a few racing assumptions

One of the frustrations of life is when people assume you must hold a certain set of values just because of what your job is.

A friend is a radio DJ who presents an urban music show. Whenever he meets fans they start street-talking about things he doesn't understand. They assume he must have grown up in Harlesden, joined a gang aged 15, before plugging some bitchy-ass mother for dissing his respect. Punk.

The reality - that he went to a private school in Tunbridge Wells before going on to music college as a pianist - never occurs to them. You see, he just happens to like, and know a lot about, urban music.

The racing game is much the same. People think that all starters at televised jump meetings are ex-army megalomaniacs who feel it okay to embarrass the sport at its most important moments and who can't understand why they aren't able to court marshal impudent jockeys for insubordination.

Well, perhaps some assumptions have a place.

But others don't.

People assume that just because you train racehorses you must automatically like hunting with hounds. They tell you conspiratorially about the great law-breaking hunt they've just been on, as if, because you're a trainer, you must agree that the ban is a great injustice.

But by far the most repeated assumption is that, as a racehorse trainer, you must ascribe to a view that the funding of racing in this country is somehow unjust.

The arguments put forward - normally by owners - are usually a not-very-well-thought-out mix of the following. Bookmakers don't contribute enough. The money they do pay is distributed unfairly. And things are better in other countries where there is a government-controlled betting monopoly.

And as a racehorse trainer, I'm supposed to agree with them.

The thing is, I don't. Because the position is as unfair at one end as it is blinkered at the other.

Why should punters, who currently lose about £1b a year on racing, 10 per cent of which gets distributed to racing, fund someone else's hobby?

The answers owners give are that they provide the product on which punters bet and so deserve to be paid. And anyway, they don't want money from punters, they want it from the bookmakers who are making profits out of them.

These arguments fall short because punters, and bookmakers, can bet on lots of things - football, financial markets and the X-Factor - that have no requirement to pay. So why should they for racing?

And you can carp at bookmakers as much as you like, but if you get too demanding, the ones who remain onshore could very quickly find themselves offshore paying no levy (or Gross Profits Tax, or the panoply of other direct and indirect revenue they contribute to the treasury) at all.

But I think the thing that grates most is not their arguments, but their attitude.

Most racehorse owners have got to the position where they can afford this expensive hobby by relying on the free-market in their business lives. And yet they want their social lives organised on the basis of protectionism.

One owner told me the other day how unfair it was that Levy funds distributed to racecourses didn't have a requisite percentage that must be used for prize money.

Why? If a racecourse receives funds (and last year racecourses only received eight per cent of the Levy, with 61 per cent already going directly into prize money), isn't it up to them to decide how they want to spend it? If they think that building a new stand is better for their business, shouldn't they be allowed to use it for that?

And if they want to attract better horses, they can put on more valuable races. But it's their choice. If, as an owner, you don't like it, then race your horses somewhere else.

Everyday I want to have this conversation, but ashamedly I nod sagely, as if in agreement, before changing the topic. And so the assumption that I think what I'm supposed to think goes on.

If I had more about me I might tell people where I stand. That we're incredibly lucky to exist in a heavily subsidised industry and that we should stay quiet. That we should pinch ourselves everyday. That we are stupid to ask for more because one day they might just turn and look at us as they board their planes to Gibraltar and Costa Rica, and pay us nothing at all.