More focus on attracting international runners to the Irish Champions Festival is on the cards for 2025 although officials at the centre of Irish flat racing’s €5.1 million showpiece concede it is facing competition from closer to home in terms of public appeal.
An overall official attendance of 18,780 was returned for the weekend action at Leopardstown and the Curragh.
There were 8,645 at HQ for Sunday’s programme which contained four Group One races while 10,135 were at Leopardstown where Economics was the headline act with a memorable success in the Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes.
The figures largely mirrored 2023 for two days of some of the very best action flat racing in Europe. However, they pale in comparison to attendance levels at National Hunt racing’s top dates.
Saturday’s crowd was close to half of the record figure of 20,017 on Day One of the Dublin Racing Festival at Leopardstown in February. More than 36,000 people in all were at that pre-Cheltenham weekend programme.
The Foxrock track also had more than 62,000 at the last four-day Christmas festival action. More than 118,000 were at Punchestown during the spring. Above 90,000 are expected to attend next week’s Listowel festival.
Jump racing has traditionally exerted a greater hold on popular interest in Ireland and Leopardstown’s chief executive wants more debate on how to narrow that gap.
“Jump racing is considerably so [more popular]. There is a sense, I think, that we have to try and encourage more of a debate within the industry as to how we move the level of interest up, how we can present it as an interesting prospect,” said Tim Husbands on Monday.
“When you go to a jumps festival, the races are longer, the horses are more recognisable. When you’re planning and running a flat racing festival there is a fixed term for each of the horses, and we have to work harder to try and find reasons why a racegoer would have an association with a particular trainer or a particular jockey or a particular horse. The racing itself was really exciting, a lot of very competitive races, and we just have to find ways to try and translate that excitement into how we position it,” he added.
Husbands said the weekend crowd figures showed how the Irish Champions Festival was sustaining its level of interest but that there were opportunities to grow it.
“If you look at our sales figures, UK ticket purchases went up from around 13 per cent up to 19 per cent and I think that’s where we most have the opportunity to grow, particularly when you look at the learnings from the Dublin Racing Festival and make that comparison.
“I think there’s a little more work that can be done there. The fact we had a significant English entry, and an English winner [Economics], will help that considerably. We can see that there’s an opportunity there,” he said.
Curragh boss Brian Kavanagh said several “tweaks” to the race programme will be examined for next year. He referenced Saturday’s four-runner Group Two KPMG Juvenile Stakes won by Green Impact, as an example of races potentially overlapping.
“The Group One’s are working well, they’re in the right place in the calendar, and they define the champions in each of the categories. There were some smaller fields which you might like to look at and check whether some of the races are targeting the same horses,” said the former Horse Racing Ireland supremo.
“The big learning for me was the international aspect. We had 28 international runners here yesterday. We had two from Germany and a winner from France, as well as a Japanese runner at Leopardstown. That’s all good.
“I think we can get more international participation. If you look at the 13 Group One races in Ireland this year, six have gone to English trainers, three have gone to Ballydoyle, and four to other Irish trainers so there’s been a good spread.
“We can look at the full race programme through the weekend to see if there’s anything to be tweaked, and I’m only talking about tweaks,” added Kavanagh.
A couple of non-runners meant Kyprios beat just a handful of opponents in Sunday’s Comer Group International Irish St Leger where the cross-channel hope Giavellotto could finish only third.
His trainer Marco Botti has indicated the horse is finished for this season and said: “It wasn’t meant to be yesterday. The race didn’t play to Giavellotto’s strengths, but it was still a decent effort.
“He got a little bit warm going to post and whether the journey took a little bit more out of him than we thought, I’m not sure. Either way, it wasn’t a disgrace.”
