Who Are The Decision Makers?
Horse racing in the UK remains a highly popular spectator and participant sport, despite well-known and significant challenges.
Managed well, the attractiveness for owner investment—and therefore the sustainability of the sport—can be guaranteed by exploiting the commercial opportunities provided through race meeting attendance, media, and betting.
In any successful industry, it is crucial to have strong leadership, vision, and a sense of purpose guiding decisive action.
Policy and allocation of funds that shape the sport are driven by a disparate group of interests, individuals, and organisations. The very large number of individual bodies representing specific roles makes it incredibly difficult to understand who does what and who gets to decide. It also enables the most organised bodies and strongest individuals to be the most influential.
The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has the accountability for leadership of the sport in the UK. This includes creating a vision and then making decisions for the management of funding in the sport.
In this section, we’ll delve into how the BHA is set up and where the balance of power lies.
We will help demystify the overall structure of all the governance bodies and make very clear how weak the critical voice is for those funding the sport—the owners.
