Jamie Lynch: Kempton makes perfect sense of place

‘From an economic point of view, the land now simply has a higher and better use. Unfortunately, racing will not continue here. Sadly, it was simply a matter of time.’

Higher and better use. It might have been true in one sense, but not in the sense of place, for a place that was once the Hollywood of racing, literally and metaphorically. The closure of Hollywood Park in 2013, explained above in cold and clinical terms by track president Jack Liebau, was seen as American racing succumbing to a disease, like an amputation not only of the sport, but also of the spirit.

A sense of showbiz and a sense of significance fused a strong sense of place that stood taller than the giant grandstand at Hollywood Park, whose inaugural Gold Cup in 1939 was won by Seabiscuit, and whose sacred surroundings gave birth to the Breeders’ Cup in 1984.

The rights or wrongs of the sale of Kempton Park will be determined only by the fullness of time, and only by the health of other racecourses, but only on a balance sheet. It makes a numbers game out of a generative game, and if the overriding emotion of the Kempton news is emotion itself, rather than abstract algebra, then that’s because racing is a game of give and take, taking vast amounts of money to propel but giving vaster amounts of emotion when the stage is right. The parks of Hollywood and Kempton are two, of the few, such passion-passport stages, built on horses, heroes and history. For racing, all the world is not a stage.

The slow death of Hollywood Park was a different case to Kempton, but there are similarities. The writing was on the wall against which Hollywood Park was lined up when it was sold, in 2005, to Bay Meadows Land Company for $260m, underwritten even then as just a stay of execution. The clue, and the admission, was in the title of the buyers that the course had run its course, but Kempton is The Jockey Club’s to sell off, and it feels like a sell out, however it’s spun.

Hollywood Park, like Kempton, had lost some its pulling power outside of the handful of high-profile, high-handle days, and Hollywood Park, like Kempton, stood still and undignified, as would a traditionally-tailored old man fitted with trainers, when attempts were made at revamping and rebranding. Hollywood Park wasn’t a person, but it was a place, with a sense of place and a pride of place as a symbol of the sport; a conduit between the present and past that gave it a recognisable relevance right up until its last day’s racing, when a two-year-old by the name of California Chrome tore up the track, for good, just before John Deere did for good.

Kempton has the same sense of place. A place is a map reference. A sense of place is a distinctive collection of cultural qualities that provide meaning to a location. More than that, it contributes depth and understanding to what it means to be human. Author Karl Raitz wrote that a sporting venue is a type of theatre in which the behaviours of those who participate or watch alter both the nature of the activity and the place where it’s practiced.

Over time, and only over time, shared experiences and stories – or history as it could be termed – help to connect place and people, blending environment with memories and memoirs that transmit from one generation to the next. As a place where the culture of horseracing could be found and felt, Kempton is a prized possession of The Jockey Club portfolio, and its closure would mean racing’s sense of place suffers a hammer blow.

‘We have a responsibility,’ said John Baker, Regional Director for The Jockey Club North West, speaking last year about Aintree, ‘to tell the stories of the Grand National and ensure that we develop a sense of place within our community.’

A sense of direction runs through a sense of place, and the direction of racing, as part of the proposal, of increasing roads leading to Newmarket, only an All-Weather one this time, threaten the distinctive diversity of our sport. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, and one All-Weather course is to a large degree indistinguishable from another.

Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of all the Kempton fallout is the uncomfortable sensation that British racing is going from the unique to the uniform and from the stylised to the standardised.

If Kempton is indeed shut down, and even replaced in part at Newmarket, racing will carry on, but it just won’t be as good as it was. You only have to look to America, and Hollywood Park, for the trajectory of that trend. A decade from now, we may say, well, we lost Kempton but we’ve got X, Y and Z. The danger is that, a decade from now, racing is in no better shape, and we’ve lost the asset of Kempton.

There are, at present, 60 places to race in Britain. Each has a sense of place, but only eight or nine combine to give racing its sense of place, its identity, its capacity, its heart. That’s why, in this argument, the heart unapologetically rules the head.