On course bookmakers' race is almost run

The Irish Times - Monday, July 30, 2012

http://www.irishtimes.com



BRIAN O'CONNOR

TIPPING POINT: If, in 10 years time, racecourse bookies are effectively extinct, it will be a very different Galway and a very different racing landscape generally.

MY FATHER, a man who cares as much about racing as Mitt Romney does about smoking killa herb, attended the Galway races before I did.

It’s 30 years ago now but a pal of his was a comparative rarity in Ireland back then due to having a few quid and having spent some of it on a brand new Merc.

The money decided it would be a good idea to hire a flunkey to do the driving, install himself in the front passenger seat, two of his pals in the back, and head to Galway on the tear. Everybody togged out in their Sunday best and travelled in style to Ballybrit, just in time to join a mile long traffic jam snaking its way into the racecourse. Suddenly an ambulance shot past them on the outside lane.

“Follow him!” the money ordered the flunkey.

They made it to the main gate where a white-coat bod let the ambulance through and then stood importantly in front of the Merc with his hand raised.

“Turn around and go back,” he commanded, whereupon the money got out of the car and proceeded to adopt the traditional I-haven’t-got-time-for-this posture beloved of gate-crash bluffers everywhere. But the coat was having none of it.

“Turn around!”

“But what am I supposed to tell the two cabinet ministers in the back,” the money thundered.

The white-coat suddenly got a lot less officious, peered in at a pair of gleaming suits staring resolutely ahead in mortification at their pal’s chutzpah, glanced over the gleaming Nazi phallic symbol they were sitting in, and waved them through.

That’s the Galway races for you. People who wouldn’t know Ruby Walsh from Ruby Wax are attracted to it like excitable moths to a jam-packed, sweaty, curried chip tinged, best-dressed lady, horse-poo whiffy splurge of drinking and messing where even if you lose your shirt, you might be able to persuade someone else to wantonly lose theirs later that night in Eyre Square.

It’s the raciness of it rather than the races that brings them, or at least the perceived raciness of it.

By now the Galway races are a self-perpetuating myth, the place where all kinds of political hookery took place in that infamous tent – as if politicians and builders ever needed to be under canvas to moisturise each other’s backs.

And tabloid tales of other types of hooker flooding in to the city for the week always produce faintly illicit living-on-the-wild-side tremors of excitement, not to mention the chance of seeing a c-list ‘sleb’ pining for attention, or Hector and the way he might screech at ya – “Let Your Money Go!”

Any number of reasons continue to be put forth for why Galway is Irish racing’s signature race-meeting.

It’s the returning emigrants back for their summer holidays, or the way the media like to pack time and space with fluff during a silly-season bereft of more substantial topics. It’s the ‘morkoting,’ or tourists stuck in the ‘wesht’ desperate to look at something else besides drizzle.

There’s something in all of that but mainly people go because everyone else does. It’s like Vegas, or an enema clinic. Everybody goes once. Whether you go back says a lot about your proclivities and tastes. The old man never did. Too packed, he decided, and they were ripping the pee out of it in terms of the price of a pint. Plus, when you’ve seen one horse, you’ve seen them all.

That’s the other thing about the Galway races. The horses are mostly irrelevant. Twenty head of Charolais bullocks could compete for the Plate and the majority of those in the stands wouldn’t have a breeze.

Attendances at most racing events worldwide are dictated by the quality of performer on show. Over 100,000 show up at the Melbourne Cup. It’s the same with the Kentucky Derby. The only time Parisians deign to notice the gee-gees is for the Arc. Royal Ascot attracts more than its share of dressed-to-the-nines and piss-heads but they congregate around a week of action that is unsurpassed in terms of class.

But not Galway. For one thing, the two big races are over jumps, at a time in the year when the best jumpers are on their holiers, chomping through summer grass, or whatever approximates to that on this wet rock of ours.

Top-class animals have raced here. Go And Go subsequently won a Belmont, Dance Design an Irish Oaks, Grey Swallow an Irish Derby. Not entirely coincidentally, all of them were trained by Dermot Weld, a man synonymous with Ballybrit, whose dominance leads most of his competitors to use this week as something of a mid-term break.

But there are races here in which the participants would be hard-pressed to get out of their own way. And none of that matters because you can still bet on them, and if there is a kernel to Galway, it is the betting ring.

Or at least it used to be. The strength of the market still allows big punters bet at Galway, permitting major five-figure bets that anywhere else would retract a horse’s price quicker than dipping a bare toe into the Artic Ocean.

The notion of bookmakers producing enough turnover in Galway week to keep them going for the rest of the year remains credible – just: in much the same way as a bookmaker standing on wooden box with a board and a piece of chalk remains just about credible. But for how much longer?

Horse Racing Ireland’s half year statistics for 2012 indicate racecourse bookmakers could soon be on the endangered species list. Their turnover for the first six months of this year compared to the same period last year is down 19 per cent to €39.7 million. But the big picture is even worse. HRI reckon by the end of this year, turnover might have dropped since 2007 by 60 per cent. In any business-sense, that is unsustainable.

The reasons are straightforward: why travel to the races, pay in and stand in the rain when you can sit on your couch, watch the races on the telly and bet on exchanges or by telephone? For most punters the answer is obvious, so much so that much of the time bookies at the races are working the computer and trading against the exchanges too. At everyday meetings, many bookies have simply stopped going. The trade isn’t there anymore.

It is at Galway, but even a simple thing like the weather could mess that up too. One bookmaker suggests she will bring her knitting to Ballybrit if it rains because any punter even slightly above the €2 each-way level will head indoors and use their i-phone to bet.

Tears for bookmakers are usually scalier than a crocodile’s back. Like lawyers and parking-wardens, and indeed newspaper hacks, there is an undoubted public sentiment that whatever crap they get, they deserve. And for such devoted followers of the capitalist ethic, the market looks to be not so much speaking to them as bellowing.

But if, in 10 years time, the market has definitively spoken, and racecourse bookies are effectively extinct, it will be a very different Galway and a very different racing landscape generally.

It will be streamlined, and modern, with any amount of digital wonderment going ping. It will be progress, something that is unarguable, and no doubt the Galway races will continue to carry that frisson of raciness that will still bring people in their droves to the side of a hill outside the city. But it will be different.

Not so different though that a white-coat bod will always let cabinet ministers in for free. That’s always a racing certainty