The Hennessy Gold Cup takes place at Newbury this weekend. The race, which was transferred to Newbury in 1960, usually attracts a big crowd to Berkshire. The relationship with the Hennessy brand and the Gold Cup is enduring one. Last year the total purse for the race was £200,000 with the winner scooping £113,900.
It seems that the attendance of racegoers to the November meeting holds just as an enduring relationship. The attendance trend below reveals that last year’s Hennessy Gold Cup recorded the largest attendance to date, 18,083. The average attendance at the event is over 16,000 (from 1989-2015) and appears to have grown during the most recent recessionary period in the UK.
The graph below displays the trend in the number of bookmakers on course for The Hennessy Gold Cup. While interpreting the number of bookies on course as a proxy for the economic impact is problematic, primarily due to the advent of online gambling, last year the number almost returned to the levels prior to the Great Recession. A noteworthy fall occurred in 2007.