Racing continues its nervous wait for next month’s budget and the potential impact of changes to the tax regime around gambling, meaning the sport’s senior figures may hope that the chancellor’s attention is elsewhere when the Book 1 sale at Tattersalls, Europe’s most exclusive yearling auction, gets under way at the firm’s historic sales ring in Newmarket on Tuesday.
You can explain until you are blue in the face that breeding and racing are not the same thing, or that the elite top tier of the yearling market, like the market for limited-edition Ferraris or 1,000-acre country estates, has always been wholly detached from what the rest of us would call day-to-day reality. The simple fact of it is that the numbers flying around at Tatts this week will be jaw-dropping, both for the average individual on the Clapham omnibus and the average politician in Westminster, many of whose constituents are still gripped by the cost-of-living crisis.
