Racing festival must go the distance

Even the greatest of journeys can have the most prosaic beginnings. Just a few miles away from where he is sitting on this overcast Tuesday morning at Down Royal Racecourse, the man they call "The Prince" honed his riding skills on a small, white pony called Chichester. Some 30 years later Richard Dunwoody is one of the greatest big race jockeys in Britain and Ireland, a master of his craft and lords it over all he surveys.

Two seats to his left sits the man who would be king. About 40 miles further north in the Co. Antrim village of Toomebridge, Tony McCoy was put on the back of his first horse - the mare Misclaire - by his father Peadar when he was two years old. Twenty one years on, his achievements have surpassed even those of his acknowledged mentor. Champion British jockey for a third successive year, he also now holds the record for the most winners in a season - 253. McCoy is a man driven by a desire for records and next in his sights is what was always thought unattainable: 300 winners in a season.

Together Dunwoody and McCoy, tall men both, would weigh in at just a touch over 20 stones. Their spartan lifestyle of self-denial and rigorous discipline is closer to that of cloistered monks than one befitting two of the greatest sportsmen this country has produced.

They have much in common, the master and the ingenu, including a remarkable straddling of their sport that has thrown up six champion jockey titles and countless hundreds of winners - many memorable, most more workmanlike, all ruthlessly efficient. Throw into that mix the Downpatrick-born Grand National winner Tony Dobbin and a host of trail-blazing flat jockeys that includes John Reid and Ray Cochrane and you have a cluster of riding talent that is unequalled in these islands.

But the most striking connection between them is also the saddest. Not one of these men plies his trade at home or anywhere near it. In recent years Dunwoody has been a frequent Sunday visitor to meetings in the Republic but that is only the happy product of scaling down his previously intense British schedule. McCoy's arrangement with champion trainer Martin Pipe means he's committed to racing in Britain and is an infrequent visitor home. It's salutary that Dobbin only had his first professional ride in Northern Ireland towards the end of last season at Down Royal, many years after he had cemented his reputation in England and Scotland.

They all left because there was nothing here to keep them. A combination of government and commercial indifference have resulted in a Northern racing industry that is under-funded, under-developed and under-utilised. There are just two tracks - Down Royal and Downpatrick - and, despite the best, progressive efforts of those involved, racing here is the tortoise to its southern counterparts' hare.

But there may be signs that there could still be a race. Dunwoody and McCoy were in town to promote an ambitious new Northern Ireland Festival of Racing at the Down Royal track over two days in November of next year.

With a projected prize fund of more than £300,000, the festival is clearly hoping to compete with the high-profile meetings at Fairyhouse and Leopardstown and will feature as its centrepieces a £100,000 Ulster Champion Chase and a £50,000 Ulster Champion Hurdle. The proposed timing of the festival is to make it attractive to the major championship contenders as they make the first steps in a campaign fixed on the holy grail of the Cheltenham meeting four months later. "We want the stars of Cheltenham 1999 and Cheltenham 2000 here at Down Royal next year. It's as simple as that," says course manager Michael Todd.

Dunwoody is effusive in his backing for the festival. "I've been running around Down Royal since I was two or three years old," he says. "Now I can come back as a champion and I want to give it all the support I can as a jockey."

And McCoy readily acknowledges his loyalty to Down Royal. "This was one of the first courses I ever came to and I was lucky enough to have a winner or two here. There are plenty of horses we can't get races for over in England and I'll be telling Martin Pipe about this festival." Good will and admirable sentiments go only so far, though, and pay even fewer overheads. But the Northern Ireland racing industry does seem to be waking up to the harsh realities of modern sporting finance. Don't shout it too loud or get too excited, but it could just be that a collection of individuals with the necessary sporting and business acumen have at last come together to do something that could be of long-term benefit to sport here.

At one end of the scale we've recently had the unseemly spectacle of glitzy but ultimately vacuous one-off, high-profile events such as the World Powerboat Championships in Bangor. Obviously, this appealed to some, but the spectacle of watching barely visible, oversized lawnmowers careering past was so dull that it looked like the sole reason for bringing the sport here was to make First Division Irish League soccer seem positively enthralling. The spin-offs are also less than clear given the unlikely prospect of a generation of youngsters begging their parents to buy them a powerboat so that they could take up the sport up and down the rivers and lakes of Fermanagh, Derry or Antrim.

Already there are indications that this racing festival could be different. A Northern Ireland Festival of Racing Company has been set up to own and manage the event. Substantial private and public money, from the Lisburn borough council, has been secured and even without the high-profile brand sponsor they hope to attract, the organisers are confident the finance is in place to secure the festival's future for at least three years. The festival may not be "showy" or brash but the thought that has clearly been given to its structure suggests it's here for the long haul.

Down Royal's reputation as one of the best galloping tracks in the country has always been widely recognised. From next year it will at last have a meeting to match that reputation.