The Boring Bloke Who Wasn't

On the first of September 2001, a small crowd of us squeezed into a flat in Sheffield to watch England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich. Owen scored a hat-trick, then jogged back to the centre circle looking faintly embarrassed, like a man who'd remembered to put the bins out. That impression — competent, detached, faintly beige — stuck for two decades. He admits it: early on, he was "micromanaged into being this whiter-than-white figure." Sound strategy for scoring goals; terrible one for being remembered as interesting.

Six Episodes of Not Taking Himself Seriously

Except now he trains thoroughbreds out of Manor House Stables, and someone has made a documentary about it — Prime Video, not Netflix, a distinction mattering to nobody but the Amazon bonus committee. The trailer shows how seriously he takes himself: asked about his reputation, he jumps in before the question finishes with "of being a boring p***k." He went on The Masked Singer dressed as a doughnut and admitted he was the worst singer the show has ever had — a level of self-awareness most footballers only achieve during a libel trial. The Independent gave it one star, roughly the review equivalent of telling a man his newborn looks like a row of parking meters — but every reviewer agrees nobody involved is protecting an image, which is precisely what makes a celebrity trainer worth having.

From the Bookies to the Owners' Box

Owen didn't arrive here through a family stud or a box handed down at Ascot. By his own account, the habit came from his father Terry, a lower-league pro who let his son pick one horse out of three in the family's Saturday accumulator on the way home from a match. A biro and a betting slip, not a silver spoon. Racing insists, endlessly, that it wants people who grew up like that. It goes suspiciously quiet the moment one actually turns up with money and a camera crew, the way a golf club goes quiet when somebody parks a transit van in the members' spaces.

Here is the genuinely good bit racing seems oddly shy about: Owen has spent years trying to drag ordinary people in behind him. His Racing Club leases ownership shares for £95 a year, in his own words, "to give everyone the chance to get involved... for a fraction of the cost." He has separately offered public stakes in his horses for under £100, saying he wants racing "available to everyone." Not a slogan from a strategy deck — a multimillionaire building his own front door into a sport that famously can't find one.

The Marketing Machine Idles

So why does the sport's marketing operation treat all this with the enthusiasm of a parish council processing an unwanted grant application? Racing once decided the way to reach young people was an Instagram Live from Chepstow with a Love Island contestant called Frankie Foster — a bit like trying to seduce someone by fax. Nothing against Frankie. But he isn't a Ballon d'Or winner with four telegenic children and Alex Ferguson turning up to lend Gemma a horse.

Meanwhile, At Head Office

Racing has, to be fair, staffed up for growth: "The Going Is Good," a £3.62 million campaign credited with a five per cent rise in attendance; "Project Beacon," which surveyed 7,500 people and concluded, in the timeless tradition of corporate research, that the answer is more of what isn't working, delivered with greater confidence; and from October, a new independent BHA Chair in Simon Cox, a master brewer whose career has involved persuading people that warm brown liquid is a personality — arguably the single most relevant CV in British racing hospitality. Either racing has hired someone who knows how to get people through the door for a good time, or a man whose instinct is to let things ferment slowly before anyone's allowed to taste them. Meanwhile the actual product streams past unremarked.

What Should Happen Next

Running a sport by committee, with competing interests and a welfare regulator too, is harder than shouting "just promote the documentary" from the press box. Take Rod Street, who steered Great British Racing for fourteen years without ever visibly losing his rag — a feat somewhere between diplomacy and defusing a wasp's nest with a clipboard. When he stood down, the BHA's own chief executive praised his "trademark optimism and vivacity," a phrase normally reserved for golden retrievers and Center Parcs brochures. Even she admitted the real difficulty was herding that many quarrelling stakeholders into one room without the furniture getting broken — which is, essentially, racing's governance model: a hostage negotiation in which nobody is in a hurry and nobody particularly wants the hostage back. Slow needn't mean absent, though. Buy advertising around the transmission slot. Get Chester, named in episode one, to run a Meet the Owens race night. Point every regional sports desk at the Racing Club before Christmas. It needs someone picking up a telephone.

Racing has just been handed a hat-trick by a man who built the goal, laid the turf and is standing in the centre circle waiting for applause. It would be a shame if the only people who turned up were the ones sent to measure the grass.