New station Racing FM galloping ahead with live course commentaries from every race in Ireland and the UK
RacingFM is very much in its infancy but founder, Dean Ryan has been encouraged by the reaction to its inception and understandably so.
Boasting in the region of 25,000 listeners and targeting around the 20,000 mark for downloads of its free app by the end of Cheltenham week, it is already a success story given a pretty tight marketing budget, although Ryan is adamant that the market is much bigger and there is more significantly more to come.
The sponsors are coming on stream as the numbers begin to stack up, while partnerships are being established within the industry itself most importantly.
An arrangement with Irish racing’s promotional arm, Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) has given it a definite legitimacy.
Prior to RacingFM, punters not sitting in front of a screen had to call a variety of phone lines at premium rates to listen to race commentaries. RacingFM provides the service completely free, either by going directly to the website (racingfm.com) or downloading the app from Google Play or iTunes.
The racing commentary is responsible for the station’s peak listenership but the commitment to quality content around that is evident in the interviews, analysis and generally high standard of contributor including Donn McClean, Rory Jiwani, Tom Lee, Rory Burke, Niall Cronin, Kevin Walsh and former Grand National-winning jockey, Niall ‘Slippers’ Madden.
Ryan himself knows racing for as long as he can remember, but was in a completely different professional environment when he decided to run with an idea some mates warned him was doomed to fail.
A Londoner, his father was a professional gambler who only enjoyed “limited success”. So the majority of his early memories revolve around racetracks. He recalls being thrown out of Sandown twice in his pre-teens.
The first time, he was unable to keep hold of his Labrador, Coca, who once escaped, ran a smart time up the home straight. On another occasion – perhaps the only one - he lost interest in the racing. Armed with a bucket and spade, he started digging up the paddock.
Soon, he had nothing at the track but the Racing Post, the first thing he ever read. By the time he was “seven or eight” he was working on a handicapping system with his father and by “10 or 11” he was selling a tips sheet he had made up himself outside the front door of Windsor racecourse for 50p a pop.
He was 10 when he got hooked. Most people recall Cheltenham in 1989 as the year Desert Orchid finally laid his Gold Cup demons to rest in the snow but for Ryan, the highlight came two days earlier, when a £1 placepot bet yielded £687.25 – a pretty penny more than quarter of a century ago.
He went at it seriously from that point on. School was there but it was in the background. Gambling at that level is a full-time operation requiring hours of study and research. There are highs and lows but for Ryan, it got to the point after a few years that the teenager realised that the stress wasn’t even worth the bountiful days.
“I learned a lot from my old man in terms of that you can’t actually be a truly happy professional gambler” he says now with commendable honesty. “You can do it and make money from it but it’s not very enjoyable.
“On that basis then I became a romantic in terms of I’d rather be right, even if I didn’t have as much money on as I should have done, than be wrong and lose too much money.”
So he left school at 17 and went into the Trust industry in the Channel Islands, which is where he was living at the time. He moved on to work in London and Switzerland too, rising through the ranks.
“I had a really good job in Switzerland but I hadn’t the passion for it. It didn’t make me get up and go to work every day. Not many people have that anyway so I was quite accepting of it all.
“But when I saw the opportunity was available for this, and I could always go back to the day job, I said I’d give it a whirl. I always felt racing needed a radio station. So with a help from a few friends with a bit more money than I have, we’ve given it a go.”
Like many of the best ideas (and the worst), it all came out of a conversation over a few beers. It was Paris in the spring, a perfect setting for a beautiful moment.
“I was at the Arc when Solemia won it (in 2012) and ended up having a few drinks with Tom Lee of Channel 4 and a few of his friends. I basically bashed their ear drums all night.
‘What does racing need? What can we do?’
“I came up with the idea of a radio station. They thought it was a great idea but impossible. I don’t believe anything is impossible so I let it ruminate for a while and then became a bit of a Google expert on how it could work, what you’d need and how you’d go about setting it up.
“About a year ago, I decided I was going to do it.”
While they didn’t deter him, he understands the hurdles his colleagues saw completely and acknowledges them.
“When I was saying ‘Let’s do something for racing’ they were saying there was too much politics involved, too many cliques, too many different organisations and that this kind of thing would need to be done by a big brand. In a lot of ways they are right and these are the struggles.
“You have to try and create something in a space that’s pretty saturated by big brands like the bookmakers and media. But with a brand name like RacingFM you do fit into that list of names and it’s all about exposure after that.
“They also didn’t think it was possible for one man to have that sort of passion to run a station 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
They reckoned without Ryan’s enthusiasm though, his love of racing and his singular vision. A custom-built studio was established in Newbridge, just a good piece of work from the Curragh, and he has landed running.
“The first thing you need to do is educate people that it exists and how to listen to it. That’s still filtering through. Thanks to the partnership with irishracing.com we’ve got a kick-start as they have such a big audience to go to war with. And it’s really about providing the right kind of programming.
"Our attraction is doing the grassroots stuff like the point-to-points show and looking at young jockeys. Giving a platform to people in the industry that don’t get their five minutes of fame on Channel 4 is the angle I always wanted to go with.”
They have the star interviews too with AP McCoy, Ruby Walsh, Nicky Henderson, Paul Nicholls, Patrick Mullins, Davy Russell, Jamie Moore, Bryan Cooper, Noel Fehily and Nigel Twiston-Davies among those making guest appearances.
It’s just a case of catering for the entire canvas. This, he hopes, will earn the support of the industry in a tangible way.
An example is the new show being produced in association with Irish Thoroughbred Marketing, the HRI subsidiary responsible for promoting Ireland as a country in which to own, breed and buy thoroughbreds.
Throw in the calibre of pundit, along with a constantly updated newsfeed, previews and tipping section, as well as a vast podcast library of all the best bits from each day, and you have an invaluable resource for the casual racing fan, the serious punter and those working within the industry.
The concept took off immediately and reaction within racing has been universally positive. But, ultimately, it needs to make money and Ryan would like to think that racing’s stakeholders will recognise RacingFM as a promotional tool and back it.
* To access RacingFM just visit www.racingfm.com or download the RacingFM app, available in the Apple and Android app stores for your smartphone, tablet or desktop devices.
