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Chief Executive's Blog
Welcome to Nic Coward's Blog. I am Chief Executive of the British Horseracing Authority and will be using this area of the website to air my views on certain issues and also talk about the future of racing and the plans we have here at the Authority.
Great Sporting Gestures - Don't bet on it
12th August 2009
Last week’s announcements by William Hill, Ladbrokes and Betfair contained the latest proof of the massive shifts in the gambling and sports betting markets. Offshore moves have been much talked about, and I won’t add to that here other than to say that it highlights again that concerted and joined up action needs to be taken by policy makers all around Europe, as well as by the UK. Closer to home though the results and what lies behind them acted as the latest reminder that there are big issues at stake – huge growth in machine business in shops; exchange activity growth continuing at a pace; and despite the continuing importance of Racing as a betting product, the further growth in football, golf, tennis and other sports betting.
On this last one, it is striking that recently two of the major bookmakers, at the same time as talking about and promoting ever more ways of betting on these other sports, have at the same time raised serious issues as to whether punters can have faith in their integrity. Nick Rust, one of the new breed of leader in the gambling sector said at the ROA conference recently that a problem with other sports is that they do not have integrity for betting purposes. Racing does, he said, but others such as, specifically, tennis, do not. William Hill have expressed openly their concerns about betting on football.
So how can it be that this activity is growing, and why is it being allowed to? That can’t be right, can it? If people offering bets are saying that they are not sure about them, but it’s a growing business, what on earth is going on? Doesn’t someone in authority need to take a good hard look at what is happening here?
Whilst Racing and Greyhounds have structured themselves and their sports, from top to bottom, on the basis that the punter is their customer (through betting operators), no other sports do. Those other sports have grown up with absolutely no relationship with betting or therefore the punter. And sports in other parts of the world can’t even bring themselves to think about it because they carry the scars of betting related corruption, or the local law and culture does not accept gambling.
Unless and until there is a real-world debate, and a framework put in place by governments to ensure sports and anyone wanting to offer a bet on them do have to have a legal relationship, addressing fundamentals like what a consumer can expect from that sport, what can and cannot be bet on, what the return is to that sport, there is a big problem.
Seeing a review of a book on great sporting gestures reminded me of the occasion when I first started to wonder whether anyone was really thinking about the impact on sports of mass market betting.
There are a great many lists of the moments of “sportsmanship” that have helped shape each sport. British Racing’s great sporting gesture was in 1982, when John Francome stopped taking rides when he drew level with the injured Peter Scudamore in the Jockeys Championship.
Jockeys, as the master story teller of this side of the game Brough Scott will never (I hope) tire of relating, live to a code between them that would shame many other sports.
But great sporting gestures on the course, in a race, just cannot happen. Racing can never have moments such as the Jack Nicklaus conceded putt to Jacklin in the Ryder Cup. The equivalent on the track would lead to an almighty stink, with disciplinary sanction, and prompt a crisis for the sport. I also doubt, now, whether we would ever see a repeat of the Francome gesture.
The reason is of course betting. Our whole sport, our rules, the philosophy which underpins them, our regulatory system, all have at their core the fact that we are providing content for betting operators, and through them, the punter. We have a relationship with those offering bets on our sport through the Levy Board, with a financial return (albeit as we repeatedly say is based on a badly broken 1960s law which if it cannot be fundamentally repaired has to be replaced), and therefore the punter is a “customer” for both of us. A Jockey, of course, owes a duty to the owner, the trainer, the breeder, but we have to look out for the other customer, who has money on it. Basically, a Jockey has got to go for the best place– sporting gestures do not, cannot, come into the equation.
Just how central the place of betting is to Racing’s rule makers and enforcers struck home in a recent meeting of regulators from around the world. In Britain, we believe that the future has to be a globalised sport, and we are pushing any initiative which can help achieve this. A current issue is trying to get harmony in interference rules, which largely comes through as an approach which looks at how the places would have been had it not occurred (France, the US, Japan) as opposed to concentrating on whether the winner would have won or not but for the interference (the rest, including Britain). The French have a betting culture, and market, that is big on the first five places. We have a betting market approach which focuses on the winner.
So the conclusion is that unless – or more likely until - the betting culture around the world harmonises, there will be differences, because the rules reflect the betting market and what the customer wants.
But that does not happen in any other sport. And frankly it should be up to the people involved and running that sport to make the decision. Doesn’t it actually follow that there should not be betting on any sport other than racing, or greyhounds - or any sport that has geared its rules to respond to what the betting customer wants?
And there’s no place for sporting gestures when there’s money on it.
Let’s go back to that great Nicklaus sporting gesture. A moment in sport that regularly makes it into the top lists of greatest-ever moments of sportsmanship. A gesture that led to a tied match. So in the new world order of betting on golf – not that golf has had a say in the matter because no one in the business of offering bets on golf has ever asked the event owner, because they have not had to, for the permission to do so – who would be setting the rules to say that Nicklaus had to force his opponent to putt out? That is the logic from the history of Racing. Nicklaus’s gesture would lead to all those who would have bet on one side or the other winning the match losing their stakes (and the winnings that the pro-US punter had already banked and maybe spent). Imagine the uproar in a world where betting business on golf has continued on its current path, without stepping in to create the legal framework.
And before you say it could never get like this, I wonder what the reaction would be, even from modern Racing punters, if those same Francome circumstances happened now. A fair few would have made big investments on a Francome win as soon as Scudamore hit the deck.
Is anyone seriously suggesting that there should be anything, anything at all, that stops those supreme sporting gestures in the legend of sport being made again?
And turn your minds back to another Ryder Cup, at the K Club. Ian Woosnam’s team has won, and could be about to win by the biggest ever margin if JJ Henry misses his 15 -20 footer on the last to lose by a hole to Paul McGinley. But the Northern Irishman concedes the putt, and is hailed a hero for it, well at least in the press.
I remember watching it, and whatever I thought about it from the perspective of getting the biggest ever win, for the record books, I understood the gesture, both for itself and as a nod to a part of a Ryder Cup and sporting history. I could not for a second really disapprove, and certainly not get angry. So I was shocked a week later when listening to a well known punter who was railing on about how appalling it had been that this man McGinley had not made Henry putt out, and gone for the win, that it was his “duty” to do so because (and forgive me getting a quote from this long ago wrong, but you’ll get the point) “he had to know that people had money on it”. And this is where the fact first came home to me that policy makers, when they had enabled or allowed the growth in sports betting away from Racing and Greyhounds, had not finished the job by putting in place a new framework for the relationship between sport and betting. At least it is happening now, with the French Government leading the field with their new law, and the fact that a business offering a bet will have to have bought the right to do so, and jumped through many regulatory hoops designed to protect the sport.
You look at an online betting site, at all the bets being offered on sports around the world where the sport has absolutely no idea that people are betting on their event, and certainly no relationship with the betting company, and therefore absolutely no thought about the punter.
If bets are going to be offered on sports, then there needs to be a very clear and open, and legal, relationship that sets out the ground rules – like we have in Racing. It has to include what betting there will be, what the sport will say its participants must do (because then there really would be a “duty” to the punter) and what the return to the sport is.
Reflect a while on those Ryder Cups, and ask whether we really want other sports which are now being bet upon in ever increasing amounts to have to go the way of Racing as a betting product. They would therefore have to say a resolute ‘no’ to gestures of sportsmanship, and to completely reshape their rules, their culture, everything, to ensure the punter can know what he knows so clearly about Racing.
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