Good article by Pricewise in the Weekender, who agrees with most of this thread. Forrestill's headline comment in the Racing Post seems to agree squarely with Stick, though haven't read it.
There is far too much agreeing going on here... The animal rights brigade can never be appeased but the sport of horseracing has jumped on the political correctness bandwagon and really has no way to stop it and get off. It seems inevitable that the race will lose its appeal as the sport’s attempts to appeal to a new younger market have generally been bad for the sport and the core older market (with disposable income and free time that the young do not have) are being alienated or, quite frankly, are dying out. The Grand National has become a mockery of its former self over the last decade or so and I agree with many of the comments on this thread about the bad changes that have occurred both in the race format (fence changes, rule changes) and the way that it has become so valuable that big operators target the race with multiple runners. That squeezes out the lower calibre horses of the little owner, which makes you wonder how many little owners will bother to keep on bringing new horses into the sport. The fairytale element has almost disappeared and with so many bookmarkers now paying out ridiculous numbers of places, the over round on the book now makes it not worth betting. Watching the betting on screen at one point just before the off it was over 140% as the front three or four in the betting continued to be shortened up while nothing was drifting out. That is what happens when you have bookmakers paying out on the first seven or eight places, a fifth of the declared field.
The link does not work because the person whose Tweet it linked to (Jason Brautigam) had deleted it. He re-Tweeted it, one suspects correcting the typo: The television viewing figures in the UK are done by BARB (the Broadcaster Audience Research Board) and they are an estimate based on a sample of representative households. There used to be around 5,000 of them covering, theoretically, all age groups, genders, ethnicities, etc. In the days when watching TV was sitting in front of a box in the corner of the room with only three or four channels to select, the viewing estimates were probably fairly accurate. Nowadays with internet channels, PPV options and hundreds of channels, it is hard to see how these are going to be accurate if mum is watching ‘Strictly’ but the kids are upstairs on the internet watching something on Amazon Prime and dad is in the pub watching the football on Sky. BARB will count mum and the kids but not dad. Obviously if the kids have gone to a friend’s house to watch Netflix then only mum counts but how do they know that she is watching alone?
