The timing of the Epsom Derby has been shoved forward to 1.30pm on Saturday June 3 to avoid a clash with the FA Cup final. Steve Dennis wonders what the fuss is all about – and suggests an alternative
On Saturday June 3, two great institutions whose health is perpetually described as ‘dwindling’ by an unending stream of amateur physicians will dominate the sporting landscape in Britain, with the presence of one bringing a little more pressure to bear on the other.
The FA Cup, football’s oldest knock-out competition and paradoxically appreciated most by those who will never get to win it, draws to its conclusion at Wembley with a kick-off time of 3pm, brought forward from its usual late afternoon slot, which puts it directly in competition with the Derby at Epsom, which has in recent years been run at 4.30pm.
This year, at that precise time, Manchester City and Manchester United will be deep into the second half, so as football is a much bigger sport than racing, and both are broadcast live on the same terrestrial ITV channel, it’s the Derby that has had to take the hit and be rescheduled to an unusually and unsuitably early post-time of 1.30pm.
That means Britain’s most prestigious (and richest) race is the second race of eight on an afternoon that will inevitably trail off into insignificance while the sun is still high in the sky.
Flurry of punches
Incidentally, it’s not the only hit the Derby is taking this year, its features being rearranged by a flurry of punches. The Jockey Club has been driven to seek a court injunction against protest group Animal Rising, which has openly stated its intention to disrupt the race, and there are suggestions that ticket sales for the exclusive Queen’s Stand – priced at an unfriendly £160 – are behind expectations. Doubtless the proposed rail strike hasn't helped matters.
However, it’s the timing change that has prompted the usual angst and anguish about racing’s position in the world of British sport, which hasn’t actually changed as for the last 30 years at least it has been substantially subordinate to football. (Or soccer, if any American readers have got this far.)
But if the Derby – the Blue Riband of the Turf, the ancestor of every race with ‘Derby’ in its title from Kentucky to Rome to Hong Kong – has to be hidden away practically out of sight in order to accommodate football, does that mean the race has dwindled to a point where its future is in peril?
No. And moreover, British racing has missed a major opportunity here. Its rulers – whoever they are these days – have, to use a topical metaphor, missed an open goal.
The premier Classic has been under assault from the quick-fixers and blue-sky thinkers almost since Diomed won the very first Derby way back in 1780, when football was still the province of 300-a-side inter-village semi-riots and played using a still-warm pig’s bladder.
Its position in the calendar – too early in the year? – has been questioned. Its distance – too long? – is almost annually attacked. Its usefulness – no-one wants a Derby winner for a sire in these speed-fixated times – has been decried.
The Derby stands firm
Yet the Derby still stands firm, like an old oak tree in a rolling green meadow, the very stuff of England, its branches blown and bent by the would-be winds of change but still intact, still throwing out leaves every spring, still connecting the past with the future by virtue of its glorious and significant present.
This year’s controversy is a one-off. The FA Cup final is normally played in mid-May, but the extension of the football season owing to the out-of-place winter World Cup in Qatar has played hell with the usual schedule, and this is where we find ourselves.
So it’s a short-term scandal, keep calm and carry on, and those who think that a 1.30pm Derby is the thin end of the wedge should remember that for a long time in the late 20th century the Derby was run mid-afternoon on a Wednesday, which with hindsight – any kind of sight really – was a ridiculous piece of race-planning, an impotent throwback to the Derby’s golden age when London’s workers set down their tools and flocked out to the country for an annual jamboree.
A lot of people, for some unfathomably abstruse reason, would like to see the Derby returned to a Wednesday, but don’t worry, it’ll never happen. What should have happened this year, though, and this is where the chance has been missed, is that the Derby should have been relocated to Sunday.
Much is rightly made about British racing’s inability to embrace what many jurisdictions see as the patently obvious and run its biggest races on a Sunday, a day of relative rest when the paying public is more available to enjoy itself than, say, a Wednesday afternoon. The 1,000 Guineas does take place on a Sunday, but it’s the only British G1 event in that position for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained.
Sunday service
Given that this year’s upheaval is inevitable, surely a nettle could have been grasped, surely initiative could have been taken, and a Sunday Derby introduced – for one year only – to give Britain’s greatest race an uninterrupted day in the sun.
It would create a selling point for the marketing team and take advantage of a valuable opportunity to try something different, in the complacent knowledge that next year a reversion to Plan A would be the simplest thing in the world.
Television coverage would be assured, the Derby would be thrust back into the public spotlight, and perhaps the predictable talk of its ‘dwindling status’ could be set aside for once. An easy win, really.
Which is something that this year’s Derby is emphatically not, after the major trial races failed to produce a convincing favourite for the great race.
Yet in pure racing terms, how can the Derby be on its last legs when the top of the betting market features horses owned by global superpowers Godolphin, Coolmore and Juddmonte, who all still see the race as one of the shiniest jewels of the year? This is a race in which victory is still a career-defining, life-enhancing moment, a race that has never lost its allure for those who always have the chance to win it.
Reports of its demise are always exaggerated. And although an open goal has been missed this year, the chance may come again.
Sure, the days are gone when barefoot urchins on every smoke-blackened London street corner knew the name of that year’s winner, when hundreds of thousands of people descended on Epsom for their one day at the races, but the most famous Flat race in the world still retains all its power to enthral and enrapture.
• View previous articles in the View from the Rail series
• Visit the Jockey Club’s Derby website
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