Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, had two reasons to be cheerful after the Irish Champion Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival (DRF) at Leopardstown on Sunday. His seven-year-old mare, Brighterdaysahead, had just won the feature race and she was cheered back to the winner’s enclosure by a sellout crowd that included several thousand visiting racegoers from Britain.
“The Dublin Racing Festival has been a great success and certainly it’s the first time you’ve seen a lot of English people coming over for the racing,” O’Leary said. “It’s a great festival in its own right and they’re all very welcome. I hope they flew Ryanair.”
Since his airline has nearly two-thirds of the market for flights between the UK and Ireland it was more of a certainty than a hope. For decades, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, in Paris in early October, was British racegoers’ big weekend abroad and reckoned to be the second-biggest annual exodus of British fans for a sporting event, with only the Le Mans 24-hour race drawing more. Less than a decade into its existence, the DRF is coming up fast on the Arc’s inside.
