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British Horse Racing to Adopt Year Long Series

The popularity of season long series like NASCAR's Sprint Cup and the PGA's new Fed-Ex Cup seems to be growing, both among fans and the participants. It is now spreading across the pond based on yesterday's announcement by the British horse racing industry of its new Sovereign Series. The new season long competition, kicking off in 2009, will be composed of ten Group I races (the European equivalent to North America's Grade I) stretching from May to October, contested at each of Britain's seven major tracks, at distances ranging from one mile to a mile and 4 furlongs and including races restricted to three year olds, for older horses and for three year olds and up.

Points will be awarded to the first three finishers and the horse with the most points at the end of the season, following the contesting of the Champion Stakes, will be declared the Series winner. The Series will have a prize pool of 2 million pounds; it is still to be determined if that goes entirely to the winner or if it will be split among the first three finishers. An additional 3 million pounds will be added to the purses of the 10 races involved, which are already contested for total purses equalling at least 5 million pounds.

One major problem will be a calendar clash with the season ending Champion Stakes. It is contested at Newmarket in October, in close proximity to Europe's most prestigious race, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at Longchamps in Paris, which is the world's richest turf race, and the Breeders Cup races in the US. It is not at all clear that an owner would want to run in the Champion Stakes if he had a horse capable of winning the Arc and the Breeders Cup, even if the2 million pounds went entirely to the series champion. The Series promoters have a year to work out the calendar kinks and let's hope they can manage to arrange it so that a horse could run in all three, perhaps by skipping the Sovereign Series September race. Maybe the Champion Stakes could be moved a little closer to the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, to enable an owner to compete in all three season ending events.

In any event, this is an exciting idea and an excellent way to promote British racing. The planners expect to add an additional 3 million pounds to be spent on promotion and that is welcome news indeed. Racing is too fine a sport to be left to its own devices. We have seen what happens without innovation and the injection of outside funds and energy like this idea should go a long way towards rekindling the British public's deeply felt affinity for the sport. If only their American counterparts were listening. This was the original concept behind the Breeders Cup, but the promotion efforts seems to have diminished over the years. More and better attention needs to be paid to that. Automatic qualification for winning certain races is an excellent beginning. Allocation of dollars to a major promotional campaign would be even better. The great stories around racing need to be told to the American public throughout the year and not just during the first week in May.

Full post as published by Sports Biz on July 02, 2008 (boomark / email).