Welcome news yesterday that Racing Victoria will be trialling half-hour intervals between races at all metropolitan and country meetings for a week in February.
The trial begins on Saturday sixth February, with Caulfield hosting the Group 3 Chairman’s Stakes and Manfred Stakes, and concludes with the Friday night meeting at Moonee Valley on February 12th.
While a trial at the Valley is hardly required – they’ve been running half-hour breaks for years anyway – it’s a major step in the right direction for it to be trialled at other tracks.
Racing has taken a buffeting in recent times, with falling crowds leaving authorities concerned about the ability of the product to attract casual punters to the track on raceday.
The Spring Carnival – racing’s time to shine, where it attracts non-enthusiasts – is most affected, highlighting the issues the sport faces in competing for the wider entertainment and gambling dollar.
The state’s showpiece event, the Melbourne Cup Carnival at Flemington, attracted 313,229 racegoers across its four days in 2014, a 3.8 per cent drop on the previous year. The longer term view is more telling, with numbers falling steadily from the high-water mark of 418,069 in 2006.
It was a similar story at Caulfield, which drew around 30,000 punters – 2,000 down on last year – on Caulfield Cup day. A decade ago that number was over 50,000.
There’s undoubtedly a number of factors regarding falling crowds. Technology now gives you to access to a multitude of bookmakers from your phone. TV coverage is also much improved, with Victoria leading the way with Racing.com, a standalone free-to-air TV channel completely dedicated to thoroughbred racing.
But other sports have undergone similar environmental changes without losing the same numbers through gate. The issue for racing is there’s been precious few changes to the raceday experience to counter it.
While the diehards still (and will always) revel in a day at the track, there seems little doubt that for more casual viewers, a day on course generally starts too early, goes for too long, costs too much, and isn’t always overly comfortable. Reduced intervals at least starst to address the first two issues..
This Saturday at Caulfield, the first and last races will jump at 12.48pm and 5.32pm respectively. That’s nearly five hours, during which there’ll be less than 30 minutes of action on track. While a day at the races is a social event, there needs to be a balance. The change to half-hour intervals will cut an hour in total from the day while still giving everybody time to chew the fat and get their bets on.
Crowds at sparsely populated weekday events will always be small, but for weekend and public holiday meetings it’s a no-brainer. Here’s hoping this trial is little more than a formality.
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