NOT many weeks go by without the question being posed regarding how horse racing is to retain its audience in a world with myriad other similar attractions and how it can hope to attract a new audience.

There have been plenty of gimmicks tried over the years, but the biggest battle is simply to produce a racing programme attractive enough for the viewer to want to sit and watch without switching off or over.

For racecourses, it’s about making a day at the races accessible and fun without being prohibitively expensive. The industry – certainly in the UK – is failing in that mission and it is for the simplest of reasons.

You can dress this conundrum up in many ways and you can attempt to use clever marketing to lure people to come to the races or watch it on television by suggesting that there’s more to it than just a bunch of horses running around a field, but the bottom line is that it is precisely the spectacle of a group of horses running around a field which gives racing its attraction, particularly when you combine that with the prospect of a wager on which of those horses might run faster than the others.

As someone whose love affair with National Hunt racing was conducted entirely through terrestrial television and newsprint until I was 18, I often wonder if I would be as smitten now had I been a few decades younger.

I fear not, and that is because racing – for all its talk of accessibility and proclamation that it is everybody’s sport – is neither as accessible nor as intriguing as it once was.

Newspapers

Accessibility in racing isn’t about marketing slogans or social media pull but about availability and while it’s a boon that there is more and more content online if you know where to look, the loss of racing content in newspapers in the past two decades did a lot of harm which is much harder to undo, but it’s television where the biggest issue lies.

Sure, subscribers to specialist channels are getting better coverage than they did 30 years ago, but new audiences aren’t reached through subscription, and the loss of terrestrial coverage from the BBC and Channel 4 has had massive consequences and left a once captive audience bereft.

With the loss of newspaper and TV coverage, we have to admit that the damage has largely been done and racing must make the most of the resources it currently has, but while ITV does well to showcase the sport with increasing coverage, the channel is reliant on the biggest days to pull in decent viewing numbers.

In my youth, every Saturday was a decent day, with a valuable sponsored handicap hurdle and/or chase every weekend, and this particular weekend was once a favourite.

The big handicap chase was the Racing Post Chase, and I remember Rhyme ‘N’ Reason beating Lean Ar Aghaidh and Mr Frisk in a battle between a trio of household names a couple of years before Desert Orchid lit up Kempton with that huge leap at the third-last fence when defying a crushing burden of 12st 3lb.

I recall quite vividly having about four month’s pocket money on runner-up Delius, but that memory is filed separately, and for obvious reasons.

I also remember 13-year-old Peaty Sandy – crocked for years by a dust allergy – winning the Eider Chase at Newcastle for Helen Hamilton and amateur rider Sandy Dudgeon to euphoric scenes from his legion of fans at Newcastle who celebrated the veteran’s 10th course win as if it was Christmas.

Any characters

When people say that there aren’t any characters in racing anymore, they tend to refer to a cast of former players ranging from the mildly eccentric to the downright deranged, and it’s likely to be a toss-up as to whether the old rogues they laud were quite as lovable as the stories suggest.

In truth, the real characters are the equine ones, and turning on the telly to see Peaty Sandy or Desert Orchid was as exciting as tuning in to see John Wayne or Errol Flynn (did someone mention characters?)

The equine stars of Saturday’s big handicap chases are The Galloping Bear (form figures F2PP8) and Sam Brown (P5FFPF14) – not so much John Wayne and Errol Flynn as John Wayne Bobbitt and Errol The Hamster.

With respect to that pair and their connections - they aren’t to blame, it’s just the billing - is this really the best showcase for horse racing that we can manage in the precious few hours available to broadcast on terrestrial television?

Ups and downs

If it is, the sport is in for some ups and downs, namely up the spout and down the drain.

If you are going to wrap up racing for a different audience on a Saturday afternoon, you won’t get very far peddling an identical programme to that taking place on a wet Wednesday at Worcester, and pointing out that the one-sided affair they’ve just suffered through was a Grade 2 and therefore much better than it looked isn’t going to wash either.

Weekend racing needs to be competitive AND classy to capture the imagination, and if you have to cull extraneous fixtures to ensure that’s what you’re serving up to TV viewers, then that’s what you have to do.

IN many way the Ascot Chase was an unsatisfactory spectacle last week but it served two useful purposes.

Firstly, it put a hole in the bizarre argument put forward last week that British horses struggle against the Irish at Cheltenham because trainers and jockeys are hell-bent on going as fast as they can in races to the detriment to their long-term results.

It’s perfectly possible for the pace to be too strong in certain races, but watching good racing day in and day out shows that jockeys able to jump off at or near the front are more likely to win, and as Cobden showed on Pic D’Orhy, it’s a lot easier to go hard and then take a breather than it is to go too slow and know when to kick on.

Cobden also did what 90% and more of British-based jockeys can or at least will not do, and that is to modify tactics after lining up at the start.

It’s often only at that point that a rider will find out what tactics his rivals are going to employ, and such knowledge must always be used in sport.

A football coach who doesn’t prepare to adjust when his opposite number makes a tactical change won’t last long in his job, and given trainers have no input from the sidelines, it’s up to a jockey to make the most of such information.

Confidence

Of course a trainer needs to have confidence to allow his rider to do so, but few great trainers believe in tying a jockey down to instructions which may be obsolete the second the flag is dropped.

Paul Nicholls is a man of strong views, but he clearly has faith that Cobden, after some inevitable teething issues, can be trusted to update tactics to suit the moment.

I’m happy to exonerate Charlie Deutsch given his mount looked unhappy in the early stages and didn’t jump with his usual fluency, but Derek Fox seemed oblivious to the fact that Deutsch and L’Homme Presse were unable to exert any influence on the leader and was happy to sit third, thereby allowing Cobden to totally control the race.

If there is an issue stopping British horses from doing better at Cheltenham and similar meetings, it is an inability to grasp the need to view races as tactical battles and adjust accordingly.

You don’t automatically gain control of a race by going to the front, but control remains the aim, and riding for luck just doesn’t cut it at the highest level.