The Jockey Club has announced it is withdrawing its membership from the Racecourse Association, dealing another significant blow to the struggling horse racing trade body.
The decision follows the conclusion of the RCA’s governance review, a process that had been running since March of this year before producing its key recommendations last Saturday.
The Jockey Club joins Ascot in walking away from the organisation, with Ascot having already signalled its intention to quit the RCA before the end of the year.
The RCA’s governance review proposed moving away from the existing one member, one vote structure in favour of a 25 per cent share allocated to each of its four main groups.
Those four groups are Arena Racing Company, the Jockey Club, large independents such as Ascot, York and Newbury, and small independent racecourses operating across the country.
Despite the proposed structural changes, the Jockey Club concluded that the reforms do not go nearly far enough to address its core concerns about the direction of British horse racing.
The Jockey Club expressed fears that the RCA’s proposals fail to tackle the body’s capacity to block important industry reforms that the sport urgently requires to modernise and compete.
Jim Mullen, The Jockey Club’s Group Chief Executive, acknowledged the work carried out during the review period but made clear it had not met the standards his organisation required.
Mullen said: “While acknowledging the work that has taken place since March, we have consistently set out throughout the review that it needed to address not just the racecourse voting shares within the RCA, but the organisation’s role in representing racecourses politically through its 50% holding of member shares in the BHA.”
He added: “Nothing proposed would displace the RCA as the political representative of British racecourses and in our view, confirmed by recent discussions, the RCA would continue to vote against necessary changes such as the introduction of an independent BHA board and substantive changes to the fixture list.”
The reference to an independent BHA board points to a longstanding debate within the sport about how British horse racing is governed at the highest levels.
Fixture list reform is another contentious issue that has divided racecourse operators and governing bodies for some time, with no consensus yet emerging on the right path forward.
The departure of two of British racing’s most prominent racecourse operators from the RCA raises serious questions about the body’s ability to speak for the industry with a unified voice.
Horse racing in Britain is navigating a difficult period commercially and politically, making the fragmentation of its representative structures a particularly poorly timed development for the sport’s stakeholders.
