SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
The BHA has published its latest racing data report, covering the improvement of the competitiveness of racing as well as the decline in high quality Jump horses.
Covering the first 11 months of 2024 in this month’s blog, Richard Wayman, BHA Director of Racing, goes into further detail about these main two elements within the report.
Following the scheduling of 300 fewer Jump races and moving a significant number of Flat races from summer into autumn, Wayman said: “My colleagues in the BHA Racing Department have worked with racecourses to make changes to the make-up of the race programme and better spread races across the year to support the delivery of more competitive racing for the sport’s fans.
“The latter has involved modelling the forecast number of runners through the year and then adjusting the volume of races to support field sizes.
“The graphs below illustrate that, for both codes, this has delivered more consistently competitive racing.”
The graph shows field sizes on the flat with the blue line representing three-year average field sizes across the year (2021-2023), with fields dipping in the summer and then growing sharply in the autumn.
In 2024, however, the organisation displayed that it has been able to consistently deliver better field sizes, with the green line generally higher and less variable than has previously been the case.
Wayman also explained that there has also been improvement over Jumps with the average field sizes in 2024 illustrated in the graph below by the red line, consistently above the three-year average, represented by the blue line.
The table also shows, however, the significance of ground conditions.
The BHA explained that the lower field sizes in the first three months of the year, when conditions were very wet and 78% of fixtures were run on soft or heavy ground compared with the three-year average of 48%, are a reminder that the elements will ‘continue to have a massive influence’ on when and where horses will run, especially over obstacles.
“This will, of course, have had an impact on the average field sizes at Premier Jump fixtures, many of which are staged in the first quarter of the year,” the Director added.
Wayman has stated in previous blogs that the decline in high quality Jump horses running in Britain is probably the ‘most concerning’ of all the numbers that the company reports on each month.
The number of the horses that have achieved a performance figure of 130 or more in at least one race during the year has been in decline for some time and, compared with last year, there has been a reduction of 11.5%, from 729 to 645.
He continued: “There will be a number of factors contributing to this worrying trend, including a much smaller number of Flat horses going Jumping as more are exported or running on the all-weather through the winter and the increasing commercial challenges associated with breeding Jump horses.
“Further factors include changes to the profile of racehorse owners with fewer sole owners and owner breeders, an increased concentration of higher quality horses in fewer pairs of hands both in Britain and Ireland, and the realignment of the handicapping file that, generally speaking, has lowered handicap ratings.”
Meanwhile, the BHA has said that in January, it will publish a review at the halfway stage of its two-year trial of changes to the fixture list designed to support the sport’s appeal to customers.
