There should be something – or rather, somewhere – for almost everyone on this year’s Boxing Day racing programme, if you live in England at least. Aintree in Liverpool, arguably the country’s most famous racecourse, will join the list of venues for the first time in its history, and whether they are north (Sedgefield and Wetherby), south (Fontwell), west (Wincanton) or in the middle (Market Rasen and Wolverhampton), serious to super‑casual racing fans and those at all points in between will have a race meeting within an hour’s drive of their front door.
But will they bother? It is a question that may be nagging at Kempton Park in particular because, while attendances at most of the traditional Boxing Day venues have recovered to their pre‑Covid levels, the crowd for racing’s most valuable and historic card on 26 December has not. The King George card pulled in 17,218 paying punters in 2019, and just under 20,000 a year earlier. The attendance for 2021 and 2022, however, was stuck at about 11,500.
That represents a serious hole in the numbers for a track such as Kempton, which has not drawn a crowd above 3,578 for any of its 66 meetings this year. Most are all-weather Flat fixtures, staged to keep turnover rolling in betting shops and online. The track’s lowest paying attendance in 2023 was 291, for a Flat meeting in early November.
When the British Horseracing Authority surveyed several thousand racegoers about a decade ago, it found that a significant majority of the sport’s audience – the punters who ensure that it is still the second-biggest spectator sport in the country – went racing once a year. It was a habit, often dating back decades, and pegged to a particular moment in the year.
Boxing Day is racing’s immovable feast, a fixed point in the calendar that can be marked off a year in advance. And when any entertainment venue depends on one or two big days each season, the ticket price is only part of the equation.
In much the same way that some Premier League football clubs cap the number of season tickets because once-in-a-lifetime “tourist” fans are guaranteed to max out their credit cards on merch, the annual Boxing Day punters are off the leash. They might cover the whole day off by finding a couple of decent winners, but on average they will leave a lot more behind via food, drink and betting than just the price of admission to the grandstand.
If this year’s King George card cannot launch a resurgence in Kempton’s crowd figure, it may be that nothing will. Constitution Hill, quite possibly the best hurdler of all time, is due to line up in the Christmas Hurdle. The feature event, meanwhile, is guaranteed to grip the attention from start to finish, thanks in part to Shishkin’s much-documented refusal to raise a gallop when he was supposed to be getting a run under his belt at Ascot in November, but also the fact that at least three of the half-dozen starters are confirmed frontrunners.
Nicky Henderson, Shishkin’s trainer, seems reasonably convinced that his runner will jump off with the field. “I’ve had some very entertaining suggestions about how we can persuade him to start,” he said at Ascot on Saturday. “I can’t personally say I’m not worried about it, of course I am, but I really don’t think it’s a big problem, I really don’t.
“Someone will go down to the start with him and I just need to check with the starter what we can and cannot do. What I think you can’t do is carry anything, certainly not a Long Tom [extended whip]. If we could do that, it would be simple.”
Henderson is right – use of a Long Tom at the start, which makes a noise but does not make contact, was banned by the British Horseracing Authority just a few days before Shishkin planted himself at Ascot. As a result, his backers will be gripping their betting slips as if they were clinging to a cliff edge as the starter calls them towards the tape on Tuesday.
Once they are off and running, it promises to be a breathless six minutes. Allaho, the favourite, The Real Whacker, a Grade One novice chase winner at Cheltenham in March, and Frodon, the winner three years ago in front of empty stands, are habitual frontrunners that dare their opponents to match their speed and accuracy over the fences. Any mistakes by Shishkin or Bravemansgame, last year’s winner, could leave them with too much to do.
The ingredients are all there for a memorable King George. We can only hope that as the leaders turn for home with three to jump, they will hear the full-throated roar from the grandstands that they deserve.
