I've fallen out of love with horse racing
It's Cheltenham week and I no longer care about the "sport of kings".
It’s Cheltenham Festival week. For the uninitiated, that’s the Super Bowl, the Champions League, the NBA finals of the horse racing calendar. Although it’s primarily focused inwards towards the UK and Irish jumps horseracing industries, you have the best racehorses in the world all coming together for one event, the best against the best, in a litany of exciting, high profile races throughout a packed week of action.
There was a time in my life when this week would have been marked out well in advance on my sporting calendar. I’d even have days booked off from work to dedicate more meaningful time in front of the television like a true degenerate; studying the form, taking in the thrills and drama of the races, and lapping up all the content and reaction that was on offer. And it wasn’t even about the betting, I just relished in the sport and competition of it all—but naturally, a cheeky winner always helped matters.
For a long time, I loved seeing the athleticism and power of racehorses live in the flesh, the eruption of the crowd as the competitors romped home over the line, the wild fist pumping of winning jockeys, all the sights and sounds of what could easily be regarded as one of the most exciting four or fives minutes of live sports action anywhere.
But nowadays, the big festival could skip past without barely flickering on my radar. It’s largely fallen out of my periphery, and anecdotally speaking to friends and other sports nerds who would’ve kept check with the horse racing on the road to Cheltenham, it’s been the same for them too.
What’s changed?
It seems, across most factors, horse racing as a whole is on the decline, beyond just fair-weather fans like myself. A 2023 report from the British Horseracing Industry showed that the number of competitors per race is down substantially, attendances in the UK were down 9% in 2022 versus pre-pandemic numbers, and gambling on horses—which funds a lot of the prize money on offer in the UK—is down 27% over the last 10 years.
The UK racing industry has been described as in crisis mode, with efforts being made to thin out the racing calendar, increase the field sizes and buffer the prize pots to attract more entries. But with the increasing cost pressures on all of the factors that go towards running and maintaining a stable of racehorses, more and more are pulling away from the scene with slowly dwindling numbers in trainers and owners.
Although the game in Ireland is generally regarded in a healthier stead, often dominating their UK counterparts on the field, Horse Racing Ireland released a report which found a drop in attendances, entries, runners and field sizes in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
In the US, horse racing looks to be in terminal decline—every statistic is down, including a 30% decrease in attendances since the turn of the millennium. As is gambling figures, despite the US easing its laws on gambling, other sports such as football and basketball have eaten into the monopoly that horse racing once dominated.
And it goes without saying that the constant microscope of horse welfare and safety is damaging to the sport and something the industry is always trying to combat, especially during high profile events such as the Cheltenham Festival when the public gaze is larger than usual. There are some serious issues surrounding horse welfare, particularly those that don’t make the cut at the highest level and fall between the cracks, with some genuinely jaw-dropping exposés out there into the treatment of unsuccessful horses across Europe.
But as callous as it may sound, that’s generally not too strong a factor that has turned me away from the sport as it exists at the highest level. Horse racing, for me, has just lost that spark—the sporting integrity, the diminishing competition, the cast and characters, the smaller fields, many other sports and distractions, and the simple division of time as work and life and other things getting in the way of once being able to dedicate a whole chunk of my time to horse racing.
I just don’t find it interesting anymore. There was a spell in the early 2010s where the sport was riding on the crest of a wave— it seemed like every race was stacked, four or five horses deep of potential winners, with a huge target on the back of the hot favourite.
There was a swell of different trainers that all offered something different, not least a healthy competition. Nowadays, that competition is filtered into just a handful of top trainers. Four of the last six Gold Cup winners have come from Willie Mullins, who now dominates the field almost singlehandedly in Ireland. Last year he had eight winners across the festival, more than all British trainers combined.
There was an army of high profile jockeys that were raw and honest that you could literally pin your colours to. I still rank jockeys as amongst the most honest and straight-talking of any sportspeople, but there aren’t as many around these days that have the same force of character and unbridled will to win and bravado that you’d have gotten from the likes of Ruby Walsh, AP McCoy, Richard Johnson or Barry Geraghty, that in many ways transcended the sport.
The smaller fields are boring and uninspiring. Even the horses themselves, bar a handful, don’t have the same name recognition as yesteryear. I’m sure a racing aficionado could put me straight on some of the big name contenders, the jockeys that are making a splash and that drama and controversy that I’m sure exists out there in the sport, but for me at least, the allure of horse racing has simply diminished greatly.
And there’s just so many distractions these days—never before has there been so much sport at our fingertips, more things to divide our attention. Granted access to Cheltenham and the big events is quite easy, with horseracing one of the last sporting bastions on free-to-air television, something that undoubtedly keeps it falling even deeper into irrelevancy.
Don’t get me wrong, every so often a story renews that horseracing spark, like Tipperary’s-own Rachael Blackmore becoming the first woman to win the Grand National back in 2021, following that up with a Gold Cup win in Cheltenham in 2022 and now generally being regarded amongst Ireland’s greatest ever sportspeople and the best sportswomen in the world, and on even footing with the men in her field.
But it’s rarely a lasting interest. Maybe it’s a lull that can be rekindled. I’ll keep half an eye on events in Cheltenham this week, but there’ll be no bets. There’ll be no tuning into every race or going out of my way to get in front of a television roughly every 25 minutes or so over the course of an afternoon.
Maybe something can relight an interest that was once unrelenting and an immovable fixture of my sporting year. But for now, I have fallen out of love with horse racing.