ICE
I popped in to ICE this week - formerly the International Casino Exhibition, but now just ICE (or, as the blurb has it, "ICE – Totally Gaming: the most comprehensive and international b2b gaming exhibition on the world stage"). It was an impressive show, and striking to note just how far it has come - and therefore just how far the industry has come - since it used to gather as a rag-tag-and-bobtail collection of fairly mediocre stands up in Birmingham a decade or so ago. Now, it's all glitz and glamour, and in an Earls Court hall so vast that someone of my limited spatial awareness had to drop marshmallows behind me in order to find my way out. I don't think I arrived promptly for a single meeting I had there, and not because I didn't turn up with heaps of time to spare.
The principle reason for my going was to chair a panel on 'the future of the betting industry' on Thursday, comprising Randy Haynes (now consulting for OPAP, but with a distinguished career in the gambling industry which has taken him through most of the big names at some point); Mark Maydon, the Commercial Director of Sporting Index (and formerly racing editor of The Sun ); Ted Robinson, Chief Operating Officer of Buzz Sports, whose newly-launched product ZonePlay is the largest innovation in in-play betting since Betfair introduced the concept ; and David O'Reilly, whose intelligent presence in the Betfair legal team for the last eight years has made him both the lurking thorn in the side of the unthinking within racing, and the brains behind most of his company's positioning. It was a top-class group, not least - with due respect to those not present - because it didn't contain any of the usual suspects.
It was interesting that in 45 minutes of decent analysis (I hardly said a word, I hasten to add), barely a mention was made of the racing industry: it was all about innovation, new products, new markets, new challenges. Combine that with the exhibition itself, where one new development after another was being showcased (and where the previous national 'monopoly' casino operators now present alongside the burgeoning private market), and it was striking to note how rapidly things are developing in the gambling industry despite the discussions that make the headlines. European governments might think the agenda is all about protecting their local market; and at home, Racing might think that it remains the leading product of importance; but I'd suggest that anyone close to the decision-making process in either group attends ICE next year, to get a feel of just how much, and how quickly, the world is moving on without them.
Upon which: on Tuesday evening I was at Geoffrey Hughes' Osborne Studio Gallery in Motcomb Street for the opening of his latest exhibition - a rather smaller but no less splendid affair - where I fell into conversation with one of racing's best-known names: a man with a forty-year association with the sport.
"When is the racing industry going to realise that it's time they just got on with life?" he asked me. "Why don't they just let the racecourses do a deal with the bookmakers and be done with it? I know the horseman's group goes on and on about things not being fair, but the way I've always been brought up to understand it, life isn't fair. It's not fair that we don't have the same weather as California. Live with it." Quite.