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Bookmakers report steady start for first Sunday evening fixture

Bookmakers have reported turnover on Sunday evening’s historic meeting at Wolverhampton “on a par” with a typical midweek all-weather fixture.

Racing took place at Dunstall Park as the first of six trial meetings scheduled on Sunday evenings through the winter, in an attempt to boost racing’s finances through increased contribution from bookmakers to the Levy.

The card featured strong numerical fields and enhanced prize-money with a minimum of £15,000 per race, with most races run for almost three times the minimum value for their respective grade.

However, concerns remain about the well-being of the participants and winning jockeys Callum Shepherd and Robert Havlin both spoke out against the trial but felt they would lose rides in the future if they did not take part.

Coral spokesperson David Stevens said: “New initiatives such as this should always be given time to bed-in, and this first meeting was up against a big FA Cup match live on terrestrial TV (Arsenal versus Liverpool), which would have had an impact, but overall it was a very solid start, with turnover on a par with a typical evening meeting.”

Betfred’s Matt Hulmes offered a similar assessment, saying: “We took what we would normally expect on an evening all-weather meeting – it was our best performing Wolverhampton meeting of the week, but you would expect that to be the case given the increased prize-money.

“It was broadly what we take at most evening all-weather meetings, but it was the second-highest turnover meeting on the all-weather last week.”

Paddy Power painted a brighter picture, with the firm’s Paul Binfield saying the new meeting was among their best staking fixtures of the week.

He said: “The new Sunday evening fixture performed really well with competitive fields of more than 11 runners and an average favourite SP of more than 2-1.

“The card was in our top five highest-staking fixtures of the week with a double-figure stakes increase on the average Wolverhampton card over the last three months.”

Wolverhampton is part of Arena Racing Company and their group operations director Mark Spincer told Sky Sports Racing on Sunday a view would be taken after all six of the trial meetings had taken place.

“As a group we decided Sunday night could be an area that would drive Levy, it gives us opportunity to own an area – when I say ‘us’, I’m talking about the all-weather tracks – that currently doesn’t have a huge amount of sport in which could mean increased turnover, which means better Levy and overall better financial performance,” said Spincer.

“I can only speak for ARC tracks and from our point of view, whatever public we get we want to accommodate. I think there’s a nice crowd, probably 6/700 being a part of history.

“I think we need to try new things, things take time to grow, look at the Racing League or Good Friday, things take time to get established, last year’s Racing League was our best attendance, Good Friday was a record attendance last year as well.

“Can we make something of the Sunday evenings? I’m sure we can at some point remembering that there are six, it’s a trial and then we pull up stumps and everybody looks at how well it has performed or not performed and then decisions will be made on the future. I’m not prepared to make any comments past six because it’s agreed as a trial and that is exactly what we are in.”

Richard Wayman, chief operating officer at the British Horseracing Authority, said one of the main aims of Sunday racing was to help grow interest in British racing.

“One of the things we are trying to do as part of the Industry Strategy is to try to grow interest in racing and grow the number of people who follow the sport,” he said.

“We’ve got various workstreams in relation to the fixture list which are designed to try to achieve that. Make more of the big stuff on a Saturday through Premierisation and we want to improve the quality of Sunday racing and through listening to our colleagues in the betting industry, who have told us there is significant growth in the amounts of money being bet generally on a Sunday evening, (we are staging the trial).

“What we don’t know at this stage is the appetite for betting on British racing on a Sunday evening, so the purpose of the six trial meetings is just to try to ascertain what demand there is. These six fixtures will tell us what the demand is.

“Callum’s comments are perfectly understandable as this does put a lot of strain on those people servicing the fixtures such as jockeys, trainers, stable staff, our own staff, the racecourse staff servicing those fixtures as there are a lot of people involved in putting a race meeting on, so as part of the trial we will get feedback from all of those people.

“At the end of those six fixtures we’ll take a view on whether this is something we should be thinking about long term or not, but only by trying it can we make that decision.

“The betting industry will make the figures available to the BHA and we have set targets. We’d like to see these meetings outperform a regular all-weather night meeting by 15-20 per cent, even if it does do that it doesn’t necessarily mean it will carry on.”

The next Sunday evening fixture is scheduled for Chelmsford on January 21.