Four Days, No Clashes: British Jump Racing Gets Its Act Together

There is a particular kind of Christmas miracle that has nothing to do with shepherds or stars, and everything to do with three racecourses, a bookmaker and a broadcaster managing to agree on something without anyone storming out of the room. I have covered this sport long enough to have grown a thick callus where my optimism used to be, so when the BHA announced this week that Kempton, Chepstow and Newbury have finally stopped treading on each other's toes over the festive period, my first instinct was to check the calendar in case April had crept up on me early. It hadn't. This is real, it is sensible, and — rarest of all Christmas presents — it appears to have been arrived at by grown-ups behaving like grown-ups.

The bones of it are these. From 26 to 29 December, ITV will carry four consecutive days of jump racing at its Christmas best: Kempton's Ladbrokes Christmas Festival keeps its rightful place on the 26th and 27th, with the King George VI Chase still the beating heart of Boxing Day; the Kauto Star Chase shifts to the 27th; the Coral Welsh Grand National becomes Chepstow's own showpiece on the 28th; and Newbury, which has spent years quietly campaigning for exactly this, gets a permanent home for the Coral Challow Hurdle on the 29th. Hereford, meanwhile, has been shuffled from a damp Tuesday in early December to the Sunday of Christmas week, purely to bulk out ITV's afternoon. It is, in short, four days built with the viewer in mind rather than four days that merely happened to the viewer, which has traditionally been racing's approach to its own scheduling — rather like a man setting off on a long journey and discovering only at the airport that he has booked two flights leaving at the same time from different terminals.

That clash, of course, is precisely what has been fixed. For years Kempton and Chepstow have gone head to head on the 27th, forcing trainers, jockeys and — crucially — the watching public to choose between two Grade One cards as though racing had so much talent and attention to spare that splitting it down the middle seemed a perfectly good use of both. It never was. It was a hangover from an age when racecourses were run as fiercely competitive fiefdoms rather than components of a single product competing for the same restless armchair audience against darts, football and whatever Netflix has decided to premiere that week. That the Jockey Club, Arena Racing Company and an independent operator like Newbury have now sat down together and voluntarily surrendered a slice of their own turf for the good of the collective fixture list deserves proper credit, and I shall be the last man in the press room to withhold it.

I would, however, gently observe that it has taken rather a long time for the blindingly obvious to become official policy. Racing has known for the best part of two decades that its Christmas programme was a magnificent set of ingredients assembled with no thought whatsoever for the recipe. That it required Entain — a bookmaker facing, in its own PR director's candid words, "heavy tax rises and increased regulation" — to broker the peace rather than the sport doing it under its own steam is a detail worth sitting with for a moment. There is something faintly comic about the industry's governing bodies needing a firm whose primary interest is turnover to point out that four uncluttered days of premium racing might generate more of it than two days of scheduling chaos. But then racing has never been shy of accepting good sense from wherever it happens to arrive, and if Ladbrokes and Coral's sponsorship money buys clarity as a happy by-product, I am not the man to sneer at the cheque.

Spare a thought, too, for Hereford, quietly uprooted from its Tuesday slot and posted to Boxing Week like a reservist called up at short notice. It is not glamorous work, being the undercard to somebody else's showpiece, but it is honest work, and the trainers and owners who had planned their horses' whole winter around the old date now have a fortnight to replan it. Racing's small and middling tracks exist, more often than not, at the pleasure of the bigger ones' television requirements, and nobody at Hereford was in the room when this deal was struck, however cheerfully Richard Wayman and company have dressed it up as "cross-industry collaboration." Collaboration is a fine word. So is convenience.

None of which should be allowed to dampen the essential rightness of what has been achieved here. Simon Durrant is quite correct that last year's King George — settled by a four-way photo finish that had grown men reaching for the replay button and a stiff drink in equal measure — is exactly the sort of drama that deserves a stage built for it rather than one shared with a rival broadcast fighting for the same eyeballs. Shaun Hinds at Newbury has waited years for his Challow meeting to stop being an afterthought and start being a destination, and he has earned the moment. And there is something genuinely stirring about the thought of four straight days of the game's best jumpers — the mud, the steam off their necks in the cold, the roar going up around Kempton's final fence as it did last Boxing Day — carried into sitting rooms up and down the country on the one week of the year when the whole nation, briefly, has nothing better to do than watch.

Racing does not often get to congratulate itself on organisational competence, so let it enjoy the moment while it lasts. This is a sport that too frequently mistakes stubbornness for tradition and calls infighting "healthy competition between racecourses." What Entain, RMG, the BHA and three very different racecourses have actually built here is something closer to a proper festival — coherent, sponsor-friendly, and above all watchable — out of a fixture list that has spent twenty years being merely adjacent to itself. It has taken a tax-squeezed bookmaker to remind the sport what it was sitting on all along. That should sting a little. It should also, four days after Christmas dinner, look absolutely magnificent on the telly.