Two weeks and two days after news broke that the Cheltenham Gold Cup was in need of a sponsor, a four-year deal has been signed with a new backer. Jump racing can be pleased with the commercial appeal of its most prestigious event, which was last offered on the sponsorship market in the 1970s, although the backer in question is a long-established friend of the sport.
The feature race of the March Festival is now to be known as the Timico Cheltenham Gold Cup, Timico being an 11-year-old communications technology company based in Newark and employing more than 400 people. A press release on behalf of the racecourse said the sponsorship is intended to build the firm’s profile in advance of an expected stock market flotation in 2017.
While Timico has been providing services to Goodwood and Newbury for some time few in racing will have heard the name before, though some of those running the company are very familiar. Its chairman is Lord Daresbury, a champion amateur jump jockey 40 years ago who served a long shift as chairman of Aintree and now holds that position at Haydock. Still more significantly Timico’s chief executive is Tim Radford, whose green and red colours have been carried by Somersby, Calgary Bay and Racing Demon among other talented jumpers and who snapped up one of the 11 private boxes in Cheltenham’s new grandstand.
With his wife, Camilla, who died in May, Radford appears to have bought into racing around 15 years ago, sending his first horses to Henrietta Knight, who won three Gold Cups with Best Mate while Radford was an owner in her yard. In her new book Knight describes Radford as “one of our best-ever friends”.
Knight having stepped back from training, Radford’s horses are now with Mick Channon and Dan Skelton. “He’s a fantastic man who dearly loves his racing,” Skelton said. “He understands his horses. It’s typical of jump racing that, when the headline act needs a new backer, up steps one of its best supporters.”
Timico will put an extra £25,000 per year into the Gold Cup, taking its prize money to £575,000. An official at Cheltenham said that, although the process had been rapid, there had been interest in that short time from “a number of different organisations” including “major consumer brands”.
Racing could certainly use that level of interest, having for the time being fallen out rather badly with the betting industry, its main provider of sponsorship. Cheltenham is one of many tracks signed up to a new scheme under which bookmakers can be accepted as sponsors only if they become Authorised Betting Partners and pay back an agreed portion of their profits from betting on racing. Only three firms currently qualify and they do not include the Gold Cup’s former backer, Betfred, which was apparently close to renewing its deal when the ABP scheme was revealed last month.
Scott Bowers, a spokesman for the Jockey Club, owners of Cheltenham, said racing remained attractive to a range of potential sponsors and pointed to a deal last month under which Bentley became the Official Luxury Car Partner of the Festival and of the Derby. Its branding will appear on the helipad at Cheltenham. Other deals involving similarly creative sponsorships are due to be announced.
But Bowers emphasised that racing “is only the size it is” because of its association with the betting industry and he hoped that more bookmakers would be acquiring ABP status. “We’d be delighted to renew sponsorship contracts with many of those firms,” he said.
