Category: Horse Racing

• Track forced to cancel scheduled meetings

• Chaotic concert aftermath led to legal action

The oft-troubled history of Chelmsford City racecourse in Essex took its latest turn for the worse on Wednesday when the track lost its licence to host fixtures. This means the cancellation of scheduled meetings including the lucrative Good Friday fixture and putting the long-term future of the venue in serious doubt.

There have been enough twists in the Chelmsford saga that Justin Timberlake’s apparent walk-on part in the latest chapter is just one more to add to the list. The singer’s concert at the track on 4 July 2025 led to chaotic scenes when 25,000 fans left afterwards, forcing some to queue for up to four hours and others to abandon their cars and walk along the nearby A131 dual carriageway.

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• Labour peer leaves sport facing governance troubles

• Major tracks call for urgent review of their association

A grouping that includes most of Britain’s major racecourses on Tuesday fired the opening shot in what could prove to be a civil war involving the country’s tracks, following confirmation by the British ­Horseracing Authority earlier in the day that Charles Allen had resigned from his position as chair of the sport’s ruling body after just six months in the role.

Jockey Club Racecourses, which controls a significant number of high‑profile tracks ­including ­Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom and Newmarket, issued a joint ­statement with four of the biggest “independent” courses: Ascot, ­Newbury, York and Goodwood shortly after Lord Allen had issued a statement of his own, confirming his departure.

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• Duty for betting on horse racing unchanged at 15%

• ‘We want to maintain Britain’s place on world stage’

Charles Allen, the chair of the British Horseracing Authority, paid tribute on Wednesday to “everyone who has played their part across the sport” after the budget announcement by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, that the rate of duty for betting on horse racing will remain unchanged at 15%.

Confirmation that racing would be exempt from tax hikes on online casino gaming as well as betting on football and other sports follows a seven-month campaign under the slogan “Axe The Racing Tax”. It was initially launched in response to a Treasury proposal to “harmonise” the duty paid on betting and gaming at a single rate.

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The Hillsin affair demonstrates that conspiring to stop a runner is one thing, but getting away with it is another

A little over two years after one of the most bizarre and downright suspicious riding performances on a British racecourse in recent decades, the British Horseracing Authority’s independent disciplinary panel confirmed last week that Dylan Kitts had deliberately stopped Hillsin from winning a handicap hurdle at Worcester on 5 July 2023, in a conspiracy with John Higgins, an associate of Hillsin’s owner, to profit from “lay” bets on the gelding.

A few days earlier, meanwhile, a 42-year-old man from Bury was arrested by Greater Manchester Police, following an investigation by the Gambling Commission “in connection with allegations of fixing horse races”.

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• Hillsin drifted from 2-1 to 11-1 before Worcester race

• Premier League player was warned off last year

A two-year investigation into the running and riding of Hillsin in a race at Worcester in July 2023 concluded on Friday when Dylan Kitts, Hillsin’s jockey, and John Higgins, an associate of the gelding’s owner, were found to have conspired to “stop” the five-year-old from winning.

Chris Honour, Hillsin’s trainer, was cleared of involvement in the conspiracy but found to have misled the local stewards at a subsequent inquiry, while Higgins’s son-in-law, the Premier League footballer Ashley Barnes, was issued with an exclusion order by the British Horseracing Authority last year after refusing to co-operate with its investigation.

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A ruling body with a board focused entirely on the long-term health and interests of the sport would be a first for racing

Around 80,000 people in Britain are employed in the horse racing industry. At least 1 million adults are estimated to have a bet on the horses in any given month of the year. And it is a very fair bet that on the morning of 13 November last year, no more than one in every 1,000 of them had even heard of Lord Allen of Kensington CBE, who was about to be unveiled as the new chair of the British Horseracing Authority, the ruling body of Britain’s second-biggest spectator sport.

Lord Allen had, after all, had very little recorded contact with the sport of kings over the course of either a glittering business career in broadcasting, his time as a Labour party insider under Ed Milliband’s leadership, or a dozen years in the House of Lords. But his lack of a racing background seemed less important than Lord Allen’s well-connected position in what had recently become the ruling political party, and his track record with events including London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics and, more recently, the Invictus Games. Beyond that, he could always learn on the job after assuming his new role on 1 June this year.

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An effective end to the decades-old distinction between betting and gaming feels increasingly imminent

The 12-week consultation on a Treasury proposal to “harmonise” the rate of duty levied on online betting – on racing and other sports – and casino gaming – for example, roulette and online slot machines – closed on Monday, and the British Horseracing Authority submitted “the sport’s formal response” to the process, with “the backing of British racing’s key stakeholder groups” last Friday. Whether or not the government takes any notice is, in the BHA’s view, a potential £100m question for the country’s second-biggest spectator sport.

That is roughly the mid-point of the Authority’s best- and worst-case scenarios if the proposal for a unified online gambling tax – Remote Betting & Gaming Duty, or RBGD – becomes a reality in October’s budget. The current rate of duty on betting is 15% of gross profits while online gaming is taxed at 21% of gross profits, and BHA-commissioned modelling suggests that an RBGD rate of 21% would cost the sport £66m per year in lost income from betting. A unified rate of 40%, meanwhile, could see the annual cost rise to £160m.

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• Racing’s rulers are close to agreement with jockey

• Murphy was fined £70,000 and banned from driving

Brant Dunshea, the acting chief executive of the British Horseracing Authority, revealed on Thursday that the regulator is going to apply “incredibly strict” conditions to Oisin Murphy’s riding licence following the champion jockey’s conviction on a drink-driving charge at Reading magistrates’ court last week.

Murphy was fined £70,000, one of the highest penalties ever imposed for drink-driving in the UK, and banned for 20 months following an incident near his home in Berkshire in late April when a car that Murphy was driving collided with a tree. The jockey was nearly twice the legal limit for alcohol in his breath when tested by police around seven hours after the crash.

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The consequences of the jockey being involved in a race-riding incident before he got to court were unthinkable

Before passing sentence on Oisin Murphy after the champion jockey had pleaded guilty to a drink-driving offence at Reading magistrates court on Thursday, Sam Goozee, the district judge, reminded him that he was “lucky that neither you nor your passenger nor any member of the public” had been seriously hurt when Murphy crashed his Mercedes into a tree in the early hours of 27 April.

Given the circumstances, he could fairly have added that the sport that made Murphy rich and famous has also been fortunate to emerge (relatively) unscathed from the latest nadir in his chequered career.

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