Having staged the draw for last year’s Derby with hand-scrawled ping-pong balls outside the local Wetherspoons, the only way was up before the 246th running of the Epsom Classic and there was a welcome sense of occasion and sporting heritage as 19 runners – the biggest field since 2003 – were handed their spots in the starting stalls for the race on Saturday.
For that, thanks were due in no small measure to the Football Association, which agreed to lend its famous balls, velvet bag and Perspex bowl, familiar from FA Cup draws gone by, for the ceremony. As Willie Carson, four times a winner of the Classic and on hand to draw the stall numbers, pointed out during the rehearsal, the FA’s crest was still obvious on the bag.
But if a little borrowing from elsewhere can help to rebuild the Derby’s popularity and status, both locally and further afield, then Jim Allen, Epsom’s new general manager, will ask away. “I came here [to the local Picturehouse] to watch a movie a few months ago, and I thought it would be an ideal venue for the draw,” Allen said on Wednesday. “I called a friend of mine at the FA to ask if there was any chance we could use their equipment, and within 45 minutes, they said: ‘Yes.’
“We tried to get a set of starting stalls into town as well, which everybody was on board for, but it was the size of them, we just really couldn’t quite fit them in, so we’re looking at that for next year.”
Allen never missed a Derby when he was growing up in nearby Croydon – “it was the one day all year when I missed school” – but nearly a quarter of a century working in a variety of roles, including director of racing at Arena Racing Company from 2006 to 2015 and a spell training horses in the US and France, has kept him away from Epsom on the big day since the turn of the century.
He has thought of little else since his appointment last October, however, and this year the Classic meeting, which opens with the Oaks and Coronation Cup card on Friday, will be his first chance to put a stamp on the event, and tempt racegoers back to an occasion that has seen attendances decline steadily. The 2004 Derby drew 48,000 spectators, but 10 years later the figure had dropped to 34,000 and last year it was just under 27,000.
“It’s my job to try to bring some of those crowds back,” Allen says. “It will take a while to learn about Epsom, it’s quite a complicated racecourse with its temporary-structure build, but basically we’ll review everything, including the marketing, the promotion, and the temporary structures, and at the heart of it will be the race. I’d like to build everything around the race.”
One of Allen’s models for the Derby’s future will be Louisville, Kentucky, where he has seen first-hand how the buildup to the Kentucky Derby takes over the city in the days before.
“We’d love to get it to that level,” he says. “It’ll take a bit of time but there’s no reason why we can’t. Epsom is a fantastic town and there are venues here to do all sorts of different things. And as we develop the strategy now, going forwards in the next six months and the next five years, the town will be a big part of that.”
The most significant news after the draw on Wednesday was the confirmation that Ryan Moore, Aidan O’Brien’s stable jockey, will ride Delacroix, the winner of Leopardstown’s Derby trial, from stall 14, while Colin Keane and Wayne Lordan will take the reins on his stable companions, The Lion In Winter and Lambourn, drawn in 19 and 10 respectively.
Delacroix remains favourite at a top price of 3-1, with Ruling Court, the 2,000 Guineas winner, on 7-2 and Pride Of Arras, who took the Dante Stakes at York last month, at 5-1. The Lion In Winter is 6-1 to bounce back from his defeat when odds-on for the Dante, and it is 12-1 bar.