Racing Post P2P Focus

A chance to catch last week’s Racing Post point-to-point focus column which was published on Friday, January 29.

And so we limp on, counting down the days until this national lockdown is reviewed, hoping positive cases of Covid will continue to fall and the shackles will be eased.

In the sport of point-to-pointing that means different things to different folks – some are being denied their fun, others are losing income or have lost jobs, and all the time horses need feeding and attention and expenditure. Golfers may have parked their clubs, but you cannot park a horse, especially a semi-fit and clipped thoroughbred in midwinter.

The financial pain is not being felt exclusively in yards – sales companies cannot hold auctions of pointers when the horses have not run, abandoned race meetings cannot make a profit, while at the sport’s Point-to-Point Authority office near Swindon two of three staff have been semi-furloughed. Chief executive Peter Wright (pictured above) remains at the ship’s wheel, and when asked if he has considered abandoning the season, he says emphatically: “At no stage have I ever considered pulling the plug.

“I am confident we will restart, and while I cannot put a date on it the figures are going in the right direction. The number of people in hospital is too high at present, but the number of positive cases of Covid is falling. The season goes on until mid-June.

“’We are an outdoor sport, with no turnstiles or issues with ventilation, so we can stage safe sport once national lockdown becomes a tiered system. That will be in our favour when it comes to discussions with local authorities about staging meetings.”

Despite the current hiatus in activity, he says: “We’ve been very busy on several fronts. The first was to create a new fixtures’ list. We needed a list to suit the horse population and provide a geographical spread, and while some meetings have said they do not want to go ahead, other venues have said they will step in.

“Some meetings unable to run in January or February have said their courses are set up and they will run in March. Ampton [in Suffolk] won’t be staging a meeting, but nearby Horseheath is prepared to hold another fixture.

“The conditions of races for the new fixtures’ list had to be looked at in order to avoid clashes of types of races, while ensuring our national sponsors were catered for.

“We have been working with the Horserace Betting Levy Board [HBLB] on funding for the sport. The HBLB has been very cooperative, but they cannot just give us a blank cheque, so we have had to work on different models which reflect the uncertainty of the situation.”

Under the heading ‘Improvement of horseracing’, the bulk of HBLB contributions to race meetings under Rules revolves around prize money – no meeting, no money – but its annual grant to point-to-pointing is given for set-up costs. Meetings need some guarantee of funding in order to commit to staging a fixture, yet the uncertainty of when a restart will come clouds how and where the money can be targeted.

A separate concern is the movement of horses from point-to-point trainers to licensed yards, thereby enabling owners to see their horses in action under rules. Wright says, “We want them to return,” and he is confident that many will. To ease the reverse journey, and following consultations with the BHA, horses who have been in licensed yards can now be entered for a point-to-point once they have been out of that yard for two weeks. Formerly it was 28 days.