With nothing better to do, I decided to trawl a few pages of France Galop to see what was going on across La Manche. The headline news is that Pierre-Charles Boudot is trying for 300 winners in France in a calendar year. He was on 296 at the time of writing, having ridden 1,522 races at 42 courses up to 22nd Dec 2016. Good luck to him in finding four more winners in the next couple of days. According to reports, Almanzor and La Cressonnière (owned by Antonio Caro and Gérard Augustin-Normand) will both staying in training in 2017. France Galop have already declared that the 2017 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe will not be run at Longchamp despite redevelopment work proceeding to plan as the builders will not hand over the keys until September. Currently, Chantilly is still favourite to be awarded the race for the second year. The new Longchamp will allegedly have a capacity of 60,000 – sounds a bit like the sardine tin Cheltenham Festival. The French have finally cottoned on to the idea of ‘Festival’ meetings, so their equivalent of the Guineas meeting will now become a two day fixture with the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches (French 1000) on Saturday 13th May and the Poule d’Essai des Poulains (French 2000) on Sunday 14th. They have also moved lots of midweek Group races to weekends: last year the Prix Saint-Alary was run on a Monday but this year it has been added to the Poulains’ card. All is not so rosy in the State/PMU monopoly finance garden. This press release from France Galop contains a lot of excuses and not much certainty. The facts of the matter are that betting revenues on horse racing are in decline as even the young French peasants are finding other outlets for their spare cash.
I think they will be in a stronger position to manage things, purely because the whole shop is controlled centrally. I am a big believer in central control as it avoids conflicts within. Devolution of responsibilities results in clashes at some stage; without central control these clashes can get out of control.
I guess you mean centralised governance of racing rather than the country, as I have always had the impression that government in France was quite devolved to the regions. When my friend and his French wife married in her small Brittany village, they started in the Catholic church and then had to go to the mayor’s office to formalise it. I could not imagine having to go to the leader of the Parish council in an English village to do extra paperwork. According to my map of all the racecourses, there are a lot more of them in France than there are in Britain, despite the similar size of population. We know how poorly attended French racing is so the only way that some of these courses can exist on negligible fixtures (e.g. Dieppe has half a dozen days racing a year) is through massive subsidy. The rake-off from the PMU is quite substantial but future increases in turnover seem more than a little fanciful. Anecdotally, many French people are in the habit of picking their bets and placing them at the local tabac on the way to work; however, that trait amongst the older generations is unlikely to be adopted so readily by the millennials because they have far more options for their spare cash – something that they have less and less of because of stagnation in most Western economies.
Yes. Maybe we can expect the closure of some French race courses at some point? I didn't know there were so many race courses in France. You aren't counting trotting race courses are you?
Hmmm. 38 gallop courses (57 including Trotting only). Never heard of a lot of them. Must be some pretty crap racing
The tote is a wonderful thing, I can't understand why there is such a distaste for it among a lot of racing folk. According to Wiki, (a source to be taken lightly) we have more than 350 courses spread right across Australia. Those courses hold nearly 2700 meetings per year, and I should imagine that probably at least half of them of them receive subsidies from the various TABs. Some might just race once or twice a year, but are well attended by the locals of the area. And as Ron pointed out, the calibre of horse at these sort of meetings is pretty crappy, but the patrons don't care. It's a nice day out. In fact, they are a really festive and important occasion for these often small towns. Prize money in Australia is quite healthy too. Today there are/were four meeting in OZ, the smallest amount of prize money handed out went to a lowly, Tasmanian maiden that payed out the equivalent of 8478 UK Pounds. Races at Canterbury, maidens included, offered in UK Pounds, 24,223. Racing in Australia, like elsewhere, has many problems, but on the whole it's flourishing. Only the USA has more starters per year, and only the USA and Japan offer more money, and all of this is carried mostly on the backs of the TABs. Australia has a population of just 23,130,000. The above is not meant as a self serving pat on the back, but a pointer to just how valuable a well run TAB system can be.
I will assume that there is a tote monopoly in Australia, so if the punters know no other form of betting they cannot miss what they never had. If there are lots of small tracks that only hold a few meetings, I will assume that the staff are not full time, the facilities require little maintenance and enough people attend to make them financially viable. If British bookmakers (or the taxman) raked off the sort of money that the PMU deducts, they would quickly go out of business because punters would calculate the percentages and see that they were being fleeced. It would be a bit ignorant of human nature to suggest that gamblers are happy to accept that their chances of winning are being reduced in order to ensure lots of prize money for people wealthy enough to own racehorses. Most of them would bet on two flies crawling up a wall and I am sure that ATR do not show moderate racing from Mahoning Valley just to fill the schedule (did anybody see it the other week when it was snowing a blizzard in N.E. Ohio and barely anything could be seen?). Those that do want bookmakers abolished in favour of a tote monopoly in Britain should take up their case with Jeremy Corbyn as I am pretty sure that the CEOs at most of the big bookies earn a lot more than twenty times what their part-time betting shop staff earn and the money ploughed into racing could be targeted at £10-an-hour minimum wages for stable staff while the racehorse owners paid 94 per cent tax on their prize money. Ultimately the sport is dying because the people that run it are chasing the wrong audience; and just like a number of other sports they have sold out the big events to corporates who bring people who are there to socialise/network and have no interest in the sport.
