As Chris Batterham, departing chair of the Racing Digital project, sends a stinging letter to the Racing Post, Nick Alexander, NTF President, spoke to Nick Luck.
It was due to be rolled out in 2025 and the first half of 2026, but a month into 2026 nothing seems to have materialised.
Now, as he steps down from chairmanship of Racing Digital, Chris Batterham has said in a letter to the Racing Post he has “grave concerns” about the ability of the BHA and Weatherbys, Racing Digital’s partners, to bring the project to completion “this year, on time, on budget and to the desired quality.”
The BHA and Weatherbys said in a joint statement that they rejected the claims made by Batterham, and that they had asked him to step down from his position.
“Who do you believe?,” asked Rishi Persad on the Nick Luck Daily podcast. “What isn’t disputed is that this is a project that has been very late in deployment, and another project where costs have spiralled. When you think about where we our in terms of technology, it must be extremely frustrating for all participants in the sport.”
Racing Digital started life in the summer of 2021 and a three-year build plan was established.
It aims to replace the Racing Administration website currently used by British racing professionals for tasks such as the management of entries, employee and ownership information.
Nick Alexander, who trains in Scotland and is President of the National Trainers Federation (NTF) told the podcast the lack of progress was “deeply frustrating” from a participant’s perspective.
“I don’t know much more than I’ve read in the paper,” he acknowledged, “but it appears that it has been very difficult trying to integrate the Weatherbys legacy systems with something new. It has been many years now, though, so you’d have thought that could’ve been recognised earlier. The current system is OK, but it has its problems and there’s a very big missed opportunity in not having something much better, which is what the BHA and [late chair] Joe Saumarez Smith envisaged in about 2019 I think.”
Pressed to name some of the current system’s failures, Alexander said it “lays a lot of traps” and “doesn’t prevent you doing things wrong.”
Some of those inadvertent errors, he reminded listeners, can lead to fines.
Alexander added that the debarcle appeared “generally symbolic” of “how difficult it is to get anything done in racing at all”, explaining that “any sensible little changes to other things seem incredibly difficult to enact.”
Asked whether Batterham’s departure was a positive development for the project, Alexander said that “if you read what the BHA say in their counter to his letter, then ‘yes’” because “they seem to believe that they’re about to make an announcement and it’s all going to be coming along soon, which would be brilliant.”
Alexander countered, though, that “it’s a shame if, as he [Batterham] alleges, the vision Joe [Saumarez Smith] had for it isn’t going to be embraced.”
He concluded by stating that the fundamental requirement of the new system is “that it works” as the current system “does work, even if it’s not great.”
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