Racing failing in marketing stakes as Glorious Goodwood loses attraction

Shortly after the Stewards’ Cup 12 months ago, the brave – or foolhardy – racegoers who had stuck it out until the feature race on the final day of Glorious Goodwood started to squelch their way towards the car parks or the bus queue to escape from the Downs after the stewards abandoned the remainder of the card.

“It poured down from the Wednesday,” says Adam Waterworth, Goodwood’s managing director. “Some of those people who came last year won’t be returning, because frankly, they had a thoroughly miserable time.

“You’d like to think that with the week we’ve had this year, people will remember that this is what Goodwood should be about and last year will become more of a distant memory.”

Goodwood’s extraordinary setting, perched so high on a hill just outside Chichester that you can see the Isle of Wight on a clear day, makes it one of British Flat racing’s most precious – and marketable – assets. It was founded by the third Duke of Richmond, the owner of the 11,000-acre Goodwood Estate, staged its first public meeting in 1802 and eight generations of landed nobility later, it is still pulling in the punters under the auspices of the 11th Duke.

Along with the majority of Britain’s major tracks, though, Goodwood is not pulling them in as it did pre-Covid, when attendance at the five-day Festival meeting would generally reach six figures. The 2019 figure of 100,104 had dropped to 95,359 by 2023 and Waterworth could see from the advance sales figures in early July that this year’s total would be at or around the same level as last year.

This is a track, on a sunny summer afternoon, that always lives up to its “Glorious” reputation, in itself a piece of historic cultural branding most racecourses can only dream about. That Britain has been gripped by a cost-of-living crisis for the past three years cannot be ignored, but Waterworth believes there are other issues racing as a whole needs to address.

“We [at Goodwood] know a huge amount about the people that come here. We do all the postcode demographics, we have research coming out of our ears after the meeting in terms of whether they were on the database before, whether they were new, whether they were lapsed returners, demographics, how far they’ve travelled and all that stuff.

“But what we don’t know, and what’s more difficult, is about the people that didn’t come. What about the type of person that used to come five or 10 years ago but doesn’t now? That’s the really interesting one for me.

“Betting turnover is down, general sports fans are not finding horse racing in the numbers they used to. There is something that doesn’t seem to be resonating with the wider public as strongly as it used to.”

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There is, Waterworth says, only so much that racecourses can do at a local level. The greater challenge is to keep people engaged with racing in the longer term, to the extent that a once-a-year racegoing habit turns into a deeper and more regular engagement.

“This is purely my own theory,” he says, “but from my experience, the lads who came on football trips, rugby trips or cricket trips once a year, when they stopped playing, they often found the sport and found a passion for it. They were betting on it on Saturday and coming more regularly. I’m not sure that’s happening in the way it used to. So what do we need to do to turn those once-a-year punters into regular fans?

“The help we really need here is with the wider messaging. If there were more people in our catchment who were aware of the sport, predisposed to coming and even thinking about coming, I’d back us to do a great job of getting them to come.”

There was certainly no faulting the raceday experience on Saturday, for all that the blazing sunshine of the first four days had been replaced by cloudier weather. While the front-running 40-1 success of the locally trained Get It in the Stewards’ Cup was a thumping result for the bookies, the celebrations among his connections in the winner’s enclosure were unrestrained.

“I’m a Sussex man and I’ve been coming here all my life,” George Baker, Get It’s trainer, said. “This is a race that’s very dear to my heart. I had to stop to compose myself a couple of times on the way down [to the winner’s enclosure] and I’ll probably have to stop again in a minute to check that we really won the Stewards’ Cup.”

What about plans for the future? “Me or the horse?” Baker said. “I’m going to be dancing in a nightclub all night.”