Training costs ?

There is a big fuss about the cost of training a horse at Newmarket brewing in the UK atm,when you consider that winning a maiden in the UK usually has a winners purse of around 2k-3k you can see why..

Maybe we can get some comparisions,i will post the average training costs in all the regions of the UK..


Newmarket £20,307
Lambourn £17,465
Yorkshire £18,587
West £9,742
South £12,273
North/Scotland £10,558

£1 = 12.8 Rand

H surely these are not monthly costs???

Yearly

I meant yearly?? that is massive..I take it that exclude transportation to various courses and nom fees?

Training fees,gallops,supplements,clipping,training costs

we in for about 150k a year locally aren't we? with winning a maiden around the same stake value as the UK

Bushy 150k would be way over the average annual cost bud and @ R12.80 to the GBP our maiden stake would be closer to 4k

1st race at the Vaal worth £3500 to the winner
1st race at Lingfield woth £1700 to the winner

and we have people complaining all day about stakes not covering costs in this country? if owners can't(generally speaking) make money out of the game here, then its safe to say that you need an exceptionally good horse to even think about making a cent? locally speaking, and abroad you need to have a frankel or camelot

I would say from 60k-100k per annum...

Greg, u correct, on average, all centres combined. Obviously, PE and Kimb closer to the lower mark, with lower stakes, less meets etc.

Over the years, the gap has narrowed between Stakes earnings and cost of keep. In today's era we must achieve more, to widen the gap between costs and returns to achieve the same as we did in years gone by. Simply put, about 10 years ago, 2 places and a win paid for 18 months keep. Today, the same 2 places and a win pays for about 8 months keep. This applies Globally.

Overall, we are quite OK in SA, when compared to the rest of the World. The fundamental remains that we must think twice about keeping horses with lower earning potential, nowadays. Time is money, so the longer the horse takes to earn, the better it must perform, when it races. And the good ones will always be the ones offering a return etc. We must find the good ones.

Ultimately, though, Racing is not so much about profit as it is about winning. The ongoing search for the really good horse, the champion, is the driving force behind the dream. Second price is the earner, the horse which is competitive. The trick is to turn them over timeously.

The seed of unhappiness in Racing, for many, is when a horse is purchased and that purchase is based on "investment " as in normal business. When that horse does not "return " , a lot of unhappiness ensues. Racing, then, is a bad investment.

So, it's better not to treat Racing as an Investment, then.... in spite of the fact that a few could easily be great examples of great investments.

The fact of Racing is that when we had Horse Chestnut, we also had hundreds of Chestnut Horses....

The fact of the matter is that racing is ONLY a source of revenue to industry insiders ( eg trainers, vets, jockeys, employees of the operator, some breeders etc., ) if you view it strictly from a financial point of view.

Owners and punters fund/patronise the sport. Period. The number of punters ( outside of bookmakers who are also professional gamblers ) and owners who benefit financially from the sport is so negligible as to be hardly worth mentioning.

The water is muddied simply because the marketing machine cannot resist overstepping the mark in some of the terminology that it uses. For example - the word 'dividend' is still used when referring to tote payouts. And 'investment' is rather shamelessly bandied about at sales time.

Horse ownership is about the so-called 'love of the sport' or alternatively a pursuit where the very wealthy and/or optimistic pursue the glory of owning an exceptional performer and consequently bask in its achievements if its successful. That's the payoff..

Something the commentators overlook when charting the rise and/or fall in ownership is the need to accurately assess the rise or fall in the wealth of the traditional owner group at any given time in history. The super wealthy are often impervious to the 'economic weather' whereas the 'middle class' is extremely sensitive as its disposable income is more limited.

I have suggested for quite some time that the decline in interest in racing is as much to do with the reality that the middles class, in particular, is so battered by OVERALL rising costs ( and not just racing costs ) that it simply cannot afford to siphon the sums of money into a recreational pursuit such as racehorse ownership as it might have in the past. To say nothing of competitive attractions that have entered the market.

The issue of stakes in the UK is an interesting one. One of the major reasons why the tote is so dysfunctional in the UK is because the punters are a LOT SMARTER and better educated than they are in RSA. Unless they are totally ignorant daytrippers they will generally not tolerate a takeout of 15% - 25% off their stakes BEFORE their selection even runs. Nor would they support a system where bookmakers often bet to 140% +. Hence the rise ( and success ) of betting exchanges such as Betfair. Our own operator has already conceded that the R20 tote punter is the REAL lifeblood of our sport. And few of them appear to have laptops and access to different markets so they keep on bleeding this captive, voiceless market with more and more racing to keep the churning going.