Racing fears a fall if BBC cuts TV coverage by half

For flat-racing trainers, this is the exciting time of year. “There you are – a line-up of dreams,” said one to me as the coming season’s two-year-olds trained on the Lambourn gallops.

But it is far from being a happy new year for racing. Bloodstock prices are plummeting, owners are cutting back. Great Leighs, the first new racetrack for 71 years, has gone into administration. And big race sponsors are becoming hard to find.

But it is the BBC that has really pole-axed the industry. Ten years ago, the corporation used to broadcast 79 days of horseracing a year. The sport was the mainstay of the Grandstand programme. Steadily, this has been chipped away to just 27. And now Roger Mosey, BBC head of sport, has announced that from 2010 it will cover only 13 days of racing.

In spite of the soaring popularity of racing over the jumps, horseracing will be cleared from BBC TV screens from October to April. One victim will be the Welsh Grand National at Chepstow.

Unavailable to the media, Mosey did write to Philip Davies, a Conservative MP, to say the BBC is adopting a “fewer, bigger, better strategy”. He argued that since racing is covered on Channel 4 and there are two specialist TV racing channels (Racing UK and At The Races) the sport will not suffer.

Absurd, says Davies, “the equivalent of Asda saying that it doesn’t have to stock coffee because Tesco has it”.

Racing authorities fear many fans cannot afford non-terrestrial channels. And they worry that Channel 4 only broadcasts racing because it is paid £2m a year to do so by one of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum’s companies, Dubai Holding. Even Dubai is being hit by the recession and Dubai Holding is to discuss with Channel 4 about whether it will extend when the contract ends this year.

The danger of the BBC’s culling of its coverage is already apparent. Victor Chandler, the bookmaker that sponsors a big chase at Ascot every January – the race drew more than 1m viewers when Master Minded won it this year – says terrestrial TV coverage is crucial to his continued sponsorship. Bookmaker Coral has hinted it will stop sponsoring the Welsh National.

Sporting and political pressures are mounting on the BBC to reconsider. Retired commentator Sir Peter O’Sullevan, former Conservative party leader Michael Howard and Jonathan Martin, the former head of BBC Sport for 17 years, are among those who have pointed out that racing attracts more paying customers in Britain than any sport except football, and that it needs a BBC shop window to attract new fans.

The BBC’s defenders ask why it should use licence fee-payers’ money to broadcast racing when another channel gets it for free.

Yet Philip Davies says that the BBC, with its unique licence fee funding, has a duty to present a sport that covers a wider spectrum of the population than any other.