Irish Champions Weekend, poor attendance

The Irish Champions Festival needs life-saving surgery - and only bundles of cash and energy can save it
author image
David Jennings
Deputy Ireland editor
Economics (right) fends off Auguste Rodin in an epic Irish Champion Stakes but only 10,135 were there to see it
Economics (right) fends off Auguste Rodin in an epic Irish Champion Stakes but only 10,135 were there to see it
Credit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)
Maybe we're expecting too much. Maybe an attendance of 10,135 at Leopardstown for day one of the Irish Champions Festival was perfectly respectable. It was on a par with the same day in 2023, after all. Maybe getting 8,849 through the gates for day two at the Curragh was a terrific achievement, 204 more than the year before. Progress. Maybe the combined crowd of 18,984 for our mid-September shindig was as many as we could have hoped for. Maybe we should be chuffed with our lot and maybe the whole occasion is actually maximising its potential.

Or, here's another theory. Maybe it's not.

There were 23,339 at Doncaster last Saturday. Yorkshire folk love their racing and Britain is a much bigger nation, so it's not comparing apples with apples when you put that figure alongside Leopardstown. But it's not comparing apples with Chinese crispy duck either. There were 11,703 people at Kempton for the King George last Christmas, yet 16,954 made their way to Leopardstown on the same day.

We can talk until the cows come home about how jump racing eclipses the Flat in Ireland, and it is a perfectly legitimate excuse for almost double the amount of people attending the Dublin Racing Festival this year compared to the Irish Champions Festival. But that doesn't mean 18,984 is good enough. It's not.

The Irish Champions Festival is too good for only 18,984 to attend, far too good. This should be our golden goose. This should be our Royal Ascot. This should be the two days of the year when we showcase all that is great about going racing in Ireland, jam-packed full of razzmatazz and zing. We should be hearing about it from March, ramming it down people's throats until they are almost so sick of hearing about it that they wish the whole thing was over, just so they don't have to hear any more about it. Like the Galway Races.

You couldn't open a newspaper, flick on the TV or radio, or have a conversation down your local boozer without Ballybrit popping up somewhere. It was annoying, but amazingly annoying at the same time. There was a real sense of FOMG (Fear Of Missing Galway).

Galway gets it. It can't rely on the racing to bring the crowds in, as a lot of it is mediocre fare, so it has to work tirelessly on other means to get bodies to Ballybrit. Of course, the Galway Races has something the Irish Champions Festival doesn't and that's tradition. It is 155 years old and that counts for a hell of a lot, but if we don't start future-proofing the Irish Champions Festival now, there is no chance it will be around in 15 years, never mind 155.

So, what can we learn from Galway, then? A five-minute phone call with Sinead Cassidy, director of marketing and communications at Ballybrit, taught me more than a whole year wasted on studying a marketing degree. If only you could bottle her passion and sell it.

Take her approach to music, for example. I'm no country music connoisseur, but Mike Denver is a pretty big deal in the west of Ireland so getting him on stage after racing was a shrewd move.

"We did extensive research and realised that the country music night was the second biggest viewing figure The Late Late Show on RTE had after the Toy Show," said Cassidy. "Country music events all around the land get huge attendances so we wanted to try to tap into that market. For all our seven days we tried to have a different theme for each one."

She said of her overall philosophy: "If things don’t change they remain the same. Our job in marketing a sport like racing is to create seamless standout experiences – great events and, in advance of that, stimulate fan engagement – sell the feeling."

Cassidy went on to explain how the track's marketing approach was segregated into four different areas – fanatics, casual, potential and lapsed – and how its ultimate aim is to future-proof the Galway Races for another 155 years. She cares, and this game is all about caring, folks.

That's not to say that those working in Horse Racing Ireland and at Leopardstown and the Curragh don't care. Far from it. There are some seriously talented people beavering away behind the scenes and wanting to make the two days as terrific as possible. As Suzanne Eade said to me this week: "Both tracks worked extremely hard so it's hard to be critical when I know the effort and the planning that went into the weekend. But there are always things we can learn."

What we need to learn is that the Irish Champions Festival has a problem, it has stagnated, and it needs bundles of cash and energy to get it to where we need it to be.

Eade reckons we should use 2024 as "a benchmark for how good the racing is" and that's fair. Apart from City Of Troy, there weren't too many other A-listers who didn't walk down the red carpet at either Leopardstown and the Curragh. There are, however, a few tweaks to the programme I would make.

Get rid of the Champions Juvenile Stakes on day one and move the National Stakes to Leopardstown to make three Group 1s each day. Then bring the Irish Cesarewitch forward a fortnight to day two at the Curragh. It is too close to the British version anyway. Now that would be some weekend. We could take a furlong off the Petingo Handicap at Leopardstown to make the trip a mile and a half. Oh, and the Irish Champion Stakes should be the seventh race on the card, not the fifth.

Scorthy Champ and Dylan Browne McMonagle win the Goffs Vincent O'Brien National Stakes
The National Stakes, run this year at the Curragh on day two of the Irish Champions Festival, could move to Leopardstown on the Saturday if they wanted to rejig things
Credit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)
Off the track we need to go gung-ho in 2025. The racing alone is not getting the turnstiles clicking, so we need to get a big-name musician for both days and splash the cash on a whole host of events over the weekend. We need to start thinking outside the box. Inside the box isn't working.

We need to tap into the St Stephen's Day crowd at Leopardstown, the thousands of students in the area who courageously fight a hangover every year to make their annual pilgrimage to the races. It is tradition, but we need to start making the Irish Champions Festival tradition for them too.

Is there more that can be done with GAA clubs and rugby clubs? Dublin football legend Ciaran Kilkenny was there on Saturday – could we not have made a bigger deal out of that? Could we have got the whole Dublin multiple-All-Ireland-winning team there for a meet and greet? Day one of the Irish Champions Festival needs to have more of a Dublin feel to it, like the two days in February do.

In fairness to the Curragh, you can see serious progress being made. The buzz is coming back. It's a slow process, but it's moving in the right direction. It felt like a real occasion there on Sunday, you felt a part of something.

That something is special; it's the Irish Champions Festival, for goodness' sake. We need to throw the kitchen sink at it in 2025 and, as Aidan O'Brien would say, look under every single stone.

Crowds are not the be-all and end-all, and the fact that Leopardstown was broadcast internationally on 36 networks in more than 150 countries is a real success story. But, when you have 13,204 more people attending a mediocre St Leger with only seven runners at Doncaster than a nine-race extravaganza with one of Europe’s most prestigious races on the card, there is something not quite right.

Maybe that's just the way things are in Ireland and maybe we should just make do with what we've got. Or maybe we can do more. So much more.