Bad idea for Turf to get all snooty about beer and bookmakers

If Saturday's Betfair Chase turns out to have been the last with the exchange's name attached to it, at least it went out on a high. The first Grade One of the British season had the strength in depth of a King George or even a Gold Cup, and in Cue Card, a very worthy, if slightly unexpected winner, whose defeat of Dynaste and Silviniaco Conti left Cheltenham's Gold Cup market showing 6-1 the field.

A job well done but not well enough, it seems, for Jockey Club Racecourses, whose scheme to sell the Betfair Chase, the William Hill-sponsored King George and BetFred Gold Cup as a package to a shiny new sponsor, ideally a global brand untainted by betting, leaked out a little over a week ago.

Peter McNeile, the Cheltenham executive who said rather more about the JCR plans than he should have done in a conversation with a Racing Post journalist, has been on gardening leave ever since. William Hill's chief executive, Ralph Topping, meanwhile, who loves a good scrap, wasted no time in painting his firm as a wronged suitor, whose generosity will be swiftly forgotten if Cheltenham's head is turned by an upmarket alternative.

William Hill, of course, puts its money into race sponsorship for the same basic reason that any other company does: because it expects to get a lot more back, in terms of advertising, brand awareness and so on. If JCR gets a better offer for its races, it will take it, and Topping would do the same.

Turning these three races into a Triple Crown of Steeplechasing was not McNeile's idea, and many valuable sponsors, from the betting industry and elsewhere, have been attracted to Cheltenham during his time as its director of sponsorship. He may have committed the cardinal sin of any executive, however, because his comments might, in the end, make his ultimate bosses at JCR look stupid.

This is nothing to do with the triple crown idea itself, which is certainly worth a try – and is, in fact, identical in structure to the Betfair Million, won by Kauto Star back in 2007. It could be argued that the triple crown concept is more suited to the Flat, where horses from the same generation can be tested over a wide range of trips, but a series of staying chases, often with single-figure fields and over roughly the same distance, might at least produce a winner once in a while.

Instead the potential for boss-embarrassment arises from JCR's wish to preserve the innocence of its new baby by avoiding a betting-related sponsor if at all possible. Perhaps they will indeed find a major global brand which oozes class and sophistication and is eager to throw its money at a sport which gets much of an audience only in Britain and Ireland. If so, the McNeile issue will soon be forgotten. If not, JCR will be forced either to abandon the idea or to swallow hard and find a betting business to plug the gap.

It seems that JCR took an equally snotty attitude to sponsorship money from bookmaking firms when the Grand National was up for grabs earlier in the year (Aintree ended up with boozy ginger beer instead). This reflects an apparent belief at the highest levels of the sport that racing and betting can be disentangled and treated as separate entities when the two have been bound together from its earliest days.

But then there are senior executives at JCR who see the bookmakers as their customers, when it is the punters who spend the cash. Betting is how punters pay for their interest in racing and, as racing edges slowly towards a more commercial future, it will become ever more important to appreciate where the money is actually coming from. Bookmakers will, in effect, be the sub-contractors who handle racing's income from betting and have the expertise and brand-recognition to do it very well.

They are not going away and the suggestion that their sponsorship cash is a second-rate currency is as wrong-headed as it is gratuitous.