Travelling Stateside - The trainer's perspective

By Alex Cairns

In recent years, international travel has become much more accessible and people now regularly embark on journeys previously the reserve of a few trail-blazing adventurers. The same is true for racehorses, whose handlers can today chart careers based on a rich international programme that offers opportunities year-round. For European trainers, America is perhaps the most readily accessible intercontinental option, with fewer regulations to be negotiated than in Asia or Australia. The relatively reduced distance from Europe to the US also provides an incentive, especially if running in the east of the country.

Ed Dunlop has been travelling horses to some of the world’s far-flung reaches for almost 20 years now and has consistently demonstrated his ability to get it right thanks to the success of horses such as Lailani, Ouija Board, Snow Fairy, and Red Cadeaux.

WHY AMERICA?

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Ed Dunlop’s experience of running Lailani in the US in 2001 benefitted his subsequent runners.

There are lucrative and prestigious opportunities for all types of horses in America, notably in the Breeders’ Cup or the Fall Meet at Keeneland in Kentucky. Dunlop may have been steeped in racing from his earliest age thanks to the exploits of his now sadly departed father John, but sending horses to the US was a learning curve nonetheless. “One of my earliest experiences and successes in America was with a filly called Lailani. She won the Irish Oaks in July 2001 before we sent her to Belmont in New York for the Grade 1 Flower Bowl Stakes in September of the same year. She won that too, but then ran badly in the Breeders’ Cup Fillies and Mares, again at Belmont. I learnt a lot from her actually because we left her there after the Flower Bowl and I think that affected her performance. This helped us adapt our approach with Ouija Board, who provided us with some our biggest days in America, winning two Breeders’ Cup Fillies and Mares in 2004 and 2005.”

In 2001, a trip to the east coast of America still represented a serious logistical challenge and financial outlay for European runners, so one can understand Dunlop’s decision not to ship Lailani home between runs. Today, however, advances in transport and reductions in cost make flying visits a viable option. “If you look at someone like Aidan O’Brien, who is probably the most accomplished trainer in the world these days when it comes to travelling horses, he flies them in and out as if they were just travelling to the races down the road in a horsebox. That seems to be the best approach, though isn’t always possible depending on the destination.”

PREPARATIONS

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Ouija Board, a dual winner and runner-up in the Filly & Mare Turf in three visits to the Breeders’ Cup.

So scaling up the same practices employed for running a horse a few miles down the road can be a winning formula, but any international campaign will nonetheless require a certain amount of preparation and planning. How should a horse be prepared for international travel? And how might running in the US compare to Asia or Australia? “Travelling horses to America tends to be a lot more simple, as there aren’t lengthy quarantines to be negotiated for us on the UK end. When we send horses to America they are travelled fit, put in the barn and kept there apart from for exercise. Then they run and come home soon after. From our experience, travelling to Australia or Japan is a lot more complicated, as both countries have very tough rules and normally around a month in quarantine is required. These regulations also affect what you can take feed-wise, so that has to be taken into account.”

Sheer geography can also have a strong influence on where might be best for European trainers to launch an international campaign. “Travelling from the UK to America is not such a huge distance, if we’re talking about the east coast anyway, so that makes it all the easier. The further you fly a horse then the greater the cost, the more susceptible they are to travel sickness, and the more chance there is of incident along the way.”

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Should horses be paid to race?

By Chris Cook

Horseracing has never been the kind of sport to rely on a maxim like: 'If you build it, they will come.' If you want people to run horses at your racecourse, you have to give them a good reason, like prize money or the promise of a good time or the chance of landing a prestigious and historic contest.

And some go further than that, offering an additional payment as incentive to owners to show up. Racing has, over the years and in several countries, dabbled with various schemes that might broadly be grouped under the heading of appearance money, without really talking through the implications.

This might be a good time to have that conversation because the incentive for tracks to attract the big-name horses is only going to increase. For evidence of that, one only has to ask Nick Smith, director of racing and communications at Ascot, about the benefits that flow now and will eventually flow to the Queen's track from having a good number of international raiders at the Royal meeting every summer.

"We started chasing international horses just because we wanted to make the meeting more interesting and develop an identity," Smith said. "The Gold Cup is a wonderful race, but it's a long time since people woke up in the winter talking about the Gold Cup at Ascot. It doesn't happen.

"So the Royal meeting needed an identity over and above fashion, globally. And that's why we worked from the start on bringing the internationals in, to make it Europe's international hub. Now the benefits are really starting to flow in because the media rights money is all linked in, the betting will become linked in -- that's a bit further down the line but it's coming -- and there's the intangible sponsorship benefits. Plus, it's what people talk about in the pub, they talk about the Australian winner, the American winner. It's one of the key selling points."

Thanks to a steady stream of US-trained winners at Royal Ascot in recent years, notably the star mare Tepin, NBC covered at least four races in that country on all five days this summer, broadcasting from two fixed positions at the course. Smith adds: "If you can put a presentation together for new sponsors that [shows coverage by] NBC, Channel 7, NHK, Fuji TV, and ITV, then you can go to sponsors and say, ‘This is what we deliver.’ Everything comes together for the general good."

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As you might expect, Ascot has sought to be responsible in its means of attracting those valuable raiders to Britain. Smith pays a fixed sum to each runner from outside Europe, depending on which part of the world they're coming from, the aim being to cover about half of their travel costs. But he will only pay for "Group One horses in Group One races," with the result that Wesley Ward's many two-year-old raiders have never qualified and must pay their own way.

"What you don't want is too many horses coming just because it's a good gig. Whilst we're really happy to have a 115-rated horse run in our Group One races and we are very happy to pay a travel allowance towards that, if we did full payments for those kind of horses, we would be overwhelmed and most of them would be out of their depth."

Smith stresses that what he is paying is "a travel allowance," to avoid any suggestion that it might be appearance money as understood in some other sports, ie an amount that might actually be greater than the prize money on offer. No one can hope to secure a net profit just by having a runner at Ascot; for that to happen, the horse must perform well.

Nevertheless, Smith is considering whether to introduce a "double allowance" for horses rated 130 or over, on the basis that there will only be one or two in the world at any time. "What I wouldn't do is change the rules for a particular horse. Black Caviar got the same allowance as everybody else and they wanted to run, so they invested in it as well, like every other horse owner.

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