Epsom manages to put brave face on sponsorship snub

Epsom, field of dreams for all who aspire to racing glory, reopens on Wednesday - and it looks terrific. An outlay of £37 million has transformed shabby to chic, creating a 21st century stage for the greatest Flat race. The danger, however, is that it could be a case of the Emperor's new clothes.
The Derby meeting starts six weeks on Friday. Yesterday (Monday), in racing's insular parish, avid talk concerned the shrinking price of an Irish colt who might have been named to win the premier classic, Fame And Glory. More pertinent, though, was the untimely financial crisis that imperils the relaunch of an iconic venue.
Epsom has built a 120-room hotel and a three-storey grandstand, to be opened on Wednesday by the Duchess of Cornwall and named in her honour. It is civilised, airy and unimaginably different from the dark, primitive claustrophobia that preceded it. But its style does not reflect the pinched climate imposing on the Derby.
Nick Blofeld, Epsom's managing director, has wide experience in consumer and marketing fields but he admits never facing anything so fraught as selling the Derby to a commercial backer in a deepening recession. “It's the toughest challenge I've known,” he said. “Not because people don't like the brand but because they don't feel they can do it right now.”
Blofeld's role, assumed last February, has been oddly invisible as Epsom has stood unused since the last Derby. “I've sometimes felt like Bob the Builder,” he said. He has doubtless also felt like an unwelcome guest in boardrooms as he strained, with the help of various consultants, to find a suitable replacement for Vodafone's long-standing sponsorship, extended as a courtesy to cover the 2008 race but now most definitely history.
He has come tantalisingly close. In January, I understand, a global company of the very stature Epsom covets was within a single signature of committing to the meeting. A heads of agreement had been drawn up and the deal was to cover the entire meeting on a three-year basis. Then the rug was pulled from under Blofeld's feet once again.
The situation is not his fault, nor that of anyone else in racing. It is a product of this precarious age. Epsom is far from alone in such strife. Even Cheltenham, a financial Nirvana in recent years, is encountering such changed times that its three-day meeting last week proceeded almost devoid of sponsors.
For Epsom, though, the problem is acute and dramatic. Theirs is the Flat race to which everyone relates, the ultimate racing product bar the Grand National. Yet time has evidently run out to find any partner for this year, unless a last-minute deal of demeaning thrift is agreed with a bookmaker.
The ground was prepared for this by separate comments made last weekend by Blofeld and Simon Bazalgette, chief executive of Jockey Club Racecourses. Bazalgette spoke of “protecting and nurturing” the Derby brand, a code for confessing the game was up. “We are prepared to absorb the cost for 2009, if need be,” he added.
Blofeld applied positive spin and enthused about returning the Derby to its status of “the people's race”, free of the vulgar appendages of modern commercialism. In truth, it is a case of making do, and for as short a time as possible.
Epsom will look different in other ways this Derby day. Three marquees are being withdrawn from the site due to the collapsing hospitality market and there will be no funfair on Tattenham Corner for the first time in most memories. The atmosphere will be changed. The race, and its glistening new stand, has seldom needed a memorable winner quite so badly.
Source:The times