Horse racing, like many sports, is looking at ways to stay relevant and appealing to a wide audience, and the winners of last year’s Hollard Sport Industry Awards ‘Event of the Year’ believe they’ve come up with the winning recipe.
It hasn’t been easy, though.
The people behind Global Team Horse Racing conducted extensive research and hosted numerous focus groups, before eventually settling on a model they believe has serious, well, ‘legs’.
GTH launched with a pilot series at Greyville in Durban last year, in partnership with operator Gold Circle, and the essence of the concept is bringing a team-based approach to horse racing, along with making the viewing experience more attractive and exciting for those attending.
“One of the problems we identified was that people attending race meetings weren’t actually watching the horse racing,” says Angus Campell, Marketing Director at Global Team Horse Racing. “They were coming for the lifestyle, the party, the fashion etc. But that didn’t seem sustainable, so we started playing around with something that focused on the racing – the ‘T20 of horse racing’, if you like.”
Global Team Horse Racing sees two teams, made up of 10 horses and jockeys, going head-to-head over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour race meeting, with each rider scoring points in each race, regardless of where they finish. Eight runners compete in each race (four per team), balanced with the horses matched according to their ability.
The team that scores the most points over the course of the meeting wins that encounter.
An entire series could be made up of five to six teams, with the two teams at the top contesting the grand finale.
“It’s about trying to build a faster, quicker, more fan-friendly product for horse racing, with a focus on how to get a younger, newer fan to the sport, and get them to actually watch the sport,” says Campbell.
HAVE YOU ALSO READ?: Q&A – Nielsen sports betting report reveals interesting findings
It’s the ‘teams’ aspect that differentiates GTH from ‘traditional’ horse racing, along with a shorter, sharper time period, a more family-friendly approach to the viewing experience, and a focus on technology, with the idea to use tech to augment that experience.
To that end, GTH imported GPS trackers from France, ran software tests, and built a user experience for the screen that shows live scoring on how each team is performing in any given race, so that fans can see exactly how their teams are doing.
“We knew that we needed to embrace technology as much as possible,” says Campbell, “and it’s just made the whole event pop.”
GTH are already exploring taking their product into the metaverse with something called ‘Meta.horse’. They also have a fantasy game called ‘GTH Go for Gold’ and the idea is that everything you see in real life can be replicated in the metaverse. This, in turn, could lead to non-fungible token (NFT) sales, and the breeding, buying and selling of horses in the metaverse, down the line.
Interestingly, GTH’s research involved looking closely at how The Hundred cricket tournament in the UK was successful in getting more women to watch cricket, and that was part of their initial approach, to make horse racing more widely appealing.
Similarly, Campbell and his colleagues also want GTH to be appealing to a wider group of potential sponsors, as they look to commercially build on a successful pilot series in 2022.
“In the same way that we’ve got new fans and a new product for horse racing, we now need to bring new sponsors to the sport, as well,” he says. “That’s our focus for this year – bring horse racing to the attention of people who wouldn’t have considered being involved in horse racing.”
That might also determine the success of GTH in 2023, with the staging of this year’s series yet to be confirmed, according to Campbell. The plan, though, is to extend the series from just the one venue last year to multiple venues with more than one race operator, more teams, and ideally taking the event to centres such as Johannesburg.
It seems that plenty is taking place behind the scenes, but Campbell is bullish, largely due to what he believes is a model that has GTH primed to ‘kick on’ from 2022.
“We now have access to all the revenue streams that other sports have access to, such as selling teams, broadcast deals, merchandising, ticket sales etc,” he says. “Before we had a team-based product, horse racing didn’t have access to those revenue streams.”
“That’s a game-changer for us.”
Dylan Rogers
