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Simon Bazalgette, chief executive of British horse racing’s largest commercial body, is about to take a huge gamble on revamping the home of the famous Cheltenham Festival

Simon Bazalgette, the chief executive of the Jockey Club, is considering a multimillion pound punt. The person dubbed the “most powerful man in British horse racing” holds the reins of 14 British racing tracks and, despite all the woes of the credit crunch, he is now contemplating a grand and lavish project to revamp the famous course at Cheltenham.

“Obviously financing big projects is much harder now,” he admits. “Over the next three, four, five years [Cheltenham is] probably the major bit of capital investment that we would like to make across the Jockey Club. We are working through various feasibility plans at the moment. We have a reasonable amount of bank debt. At the height we probably had £130m to £140m of debt. We are now down to between £90m and £100m. And that’s reducing significantly this year. I’m sure debt will be a part of [the Cheltenham redevelopment].”

It is not clear just how much a revamp of Cheltenham would cost, although £30m has been spent at Epsom and £25m on Aintree. While raising debt may be challenging in these markets, the famous festival course is crucial to the club and the man running it.

Industry gossips reckon Cheltenham accounts for about half of its £18.3m operating profit (the Jockey Club says it is impossible to split out and that the course is a “key source”, but contributes less than half, of revenues).

Still, Cheltenham management believes a redevelopment is long overdue and racing rumours suggest it is about to use its sway to achieve what it wants. Some suggest building work could start immediately after the 2014 Cheltenham Festival, but Bazalgette is unmoved. “It is still at an early stage,” he blocks. He gives little further ground, which is what you might expect from a man of coming from such a successful bloodline. The great, great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the designer of London’s sewers, he is also a cousin of media entrepreneur Peter Bazalgette, who brought Big Brother to British television audiences and promoted the format all around the world.

Bazalgette of the Jockey Club also made his name in the media business, having founded pay television channel Music Choice Europe, before, in 2004, joining Racing UK, the fledgling horse racing channel owned by a collection of courses, many from the Jockey Club’s own stable. He is now using the tricks he learned within the world of broadcasting in an attempt to rebrand racing, which can sometimes seem impenetrable to the outsider. His latest effort is the introduction of the British Champions Series, launched in April, which is an attempt to provide some coherence to the flat racing season in the wake of the aborted Sovereign Series.

It is basically a brand that wraps around the great flat meetings such as the Guineas, the Derby, Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood, and culminates in the British Champions Day, the UK’s richest race day with more than £3m in prize money. It all got off to a decent start this year with the emergence of an equine superstar, Frankel, the 2000 Guineas and Queen Elizabeth II Stakes winner, but it is still not clear what the series is intended to be.

Bazalgette peppers the rationale behind the series with management-speak. It has been about “creating a vehicle” or it is “a platform to help create a larger [racing] economy”, he says, claims demonstrated by the “multi-million pound” sponsorship deal signed with Qatari investment firm Qipco.

Aficionado

However, the corporate waffle is more easily deciphered than the series’ actual structure, especially if you are not a racing aficionado. Horses do not accumulate points to qualify for Champions Day as you might expect. In fact, as long as the horse has a high enough rating, it can just turn up to the finale.

“It’s [a] simple [system] for racing but slightly more complicated than for any other sport,” admits Bazalgette, who is actually more of a football fan and supports Brentford. “We recognise part of the challenge is to start to bring in more formal mechanics, whether it’s a bonus prize, whether it’s league tables, whether it’s qualification, you can debate that. We recognise this is only the starting point”.

The other big issue on his desk goes back to his broadcasting roots and relates to which channel punters will be watching racing on from 2013. Budgets at BBC Sport, which broadcasts the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot, have been cut by around 15%. With renegotiations on broadcast rights now under way, there is speculation that the BBC might prefer to spend its dwindling reserves on the big Aintree steeplechase rather than keep covering the other events.

Meanwhile, can the current Channel 4 deal, in which racing subsidises the broadcaster’s costs, continue? “My own view is that [the BBC will] want to keep the National and that they’ll fight to keep it,” Bazalgette says. “The environment for the last broadcast deal was very difficult, which came just as the advertising market was collapsing and ITV and Channel 4 were in complete crisis. That’s not the way now. The advertising market has come back and is doing very well. There’s a lot more money around from bookmaker advertising in way that wasn’t the case three or four years ago. My view is that Channel 4 and even ITV will be very interested now. The value to Channel 4 of racing is lot more than it was three to four years ago and I’d think that will be reflected in next round of discussions”.

Sluggish

Other media revenues from Racing UK – and its spin-off Turf TV – in which the Jockey Club is a shareholder will also increase from 2013, but until then Bazalgette admits that the club faces a “tough” 2012 as it operates in a sluggish economy and competes for corporate hospitality customers in Olympic year.

Jockey Club profits are recycled into racing, – not into shareholders’ pockets – so that perhaps explains why, despite having the technology ready, Bazalgette seems reluctant to invest in a high definition channel for Racing UK subscribers. It is also why Cheltenham and the Champions Series are such big deals. There is a lot riding on them.

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