Can't copy a carnival

Having just returned from a week at Royal Ascot, I found Richo’s article (25/6) about following the English lead with our carnivals of particular interest.

A lot of Richo’s points are well made — it is a fantastically well run and well attended carnival — but while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is rarely the blueprint for great success.

The reason for this is that so many things do not translate when put in a different situation. Imagine if we were to copy their prizemoney levels — I doubt we’d find much quality in our carnivals if we were to do that!

Racing there truly is the Sport of Kings. With most owners being billionaires and the prizemoney being academic, it is all about the prestige of winning.

I suspect nobody at Ascot has ever felt the need to copy the Melbourne Cup carnival, where crowds are even greater than at Ascot. Quite simply, a day of racing starting at 10am wouldn’t work for them.

A day at Royal Ascot is far more about a luncheon followed by the Royal Procession and ending with a singalong by tens of thousands to a bunch of traditional English songs. Oh yes, and a few races in between, which drew far less excitement for most of the crowds than the events either side of them.

The general media interest certainly did pipe up about the Goldikova vs Canford Cliffs battle, about Frankel and So You Think, and then about the Ascot Gold Cup, but beyond that there was very little mention of any of the other "stars" Richo mentioned. Sepoy would have had much more press in Australia either side of Slipper day than what Together, Bewitched, Star Witness and co received in the English media.

Royal Ascot may in theory be a racing carnival, but the racing itself is almost incidental in the coverage of it. The carnival is of the magnitude it is through 300 years of tradition, and that is something that can’t be manufactured down here in order to reproduce its results.

I certainly agree that there are things we can do to improve our carnivals.

The AJC did make a short-lived attempt at condensing its carnival like the VRC’s but learnt that copying formats won’t mean getting the same result.

It also needs to be remembered that the population of Australia is a third of Britain’s. We already have one carnival that matches Royal Ascot, we surely can’t expect to similarly match or beat each of their other major carnivals.

We do have Oakbank at Easter that draws up to 100,000 over the two days — no packaging of the Adelaide Cup carnival a month or so later will ever come close to matching this. Adelaide won’t attract the best horses so any "racing tourist" considering Adelaide is already best served by Oakbank.

Other smaller scale examples such as Warrnambool, Scone and Grafton, all of which Richo has mentioned, probably provide a better blueprint for the metropolitan clubs, and certainly should be looked into closely by the likes of Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast as an alternative to their single-day events during the Queensland winter carnival.

The opportunity for Sydney and Brisbane to revamp their carnivals to be more "tourist-friendly" certainly exists. Perhaps Eagle Farm should spread its feature races across the Saturday and public-holiday Monday and promote a super weekend of racing with the Derby and Stradbroke on Saturday and the Cup and the Oaks on the Monday.

Racing three straight days is less likely to work here — other than Her Majesty, few at Ascot attended more than a couple of days of the carnival.

Reducing cards to six races is also likely to be more of a turnoff here as we’re never going to have the ability to provide the other aspects that Royal Ascot has. The racing must be the primary focus of our carnivals, and the less product we provide, the less popular the event will be.

It’s all very well to have after-race concerts and the like, but if we have to sell racing through other means are we really selling racing at all?

Royal Ascot is an amazing carnival, but it is amazing for so many reasons and couldn’t successfully be copied by anywhere in the world. We have examples in our own backyard that are equally relevant as blueprints to follow for what can work in Australia if put together right.