Biggest Horse Racing Festivals Around the World

Horse Racing is one of the biggest and most watched sports in the world. Fans from all over the globe are in no short supply and most of them tune in to watch and many even attend horse racing festivals. The UK is known for having a lot of massive horse racing festivals but they are not the only ones with big festivals. Lots of countries around the world have huge events dedicated to the sport, so what are they and, importantly, where are they?

Dubai World Cup Night in the UAE

This festival is an 8-horse event that takes place in Meydan Racecourse in Dubai. It was previously held in the Nad Al Sheba racecourse until 2010 when they swapped over to the all-weather surface of the Meydan Racecourse.

The main race of the festival is called the Dubai World Cup and is the richest race in the world. It is also one of the newest, first debuting in 1996. Comparing that to some of the British races that are a hundred years old, the time gap is significant.

The World Cup prize is $12 million and the overall prizes that were given out for the entire event added up to around $27.5 million. This is equivalent to 18,126,120,000.00 Nigerian Naira and 41,539,025,000.00 Nigerian Naira.

Irish Grand National in Ireland

The BoyleSports Irish Grand National is one of the most prestigious horse racing events in the world. Boylesport has been sponsoring the event since 2014 and brought in extra money for it. 

This festival is one of the oldest in the world of horse racing with the Boylesports Irish Grand National being created and moved into its home of Fairyhouse Racecourse way back in 1870. 

If you won the event you would get a prize purse of £270,000 (which is 517,637,790.00 Nigerian Naira) and the overall prize fund is £500,000 (958,664,052.50 Nigerian Naira) which is a massive difference to the Dubai winnings. 

Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival, Australia

This racing festival is slightly different to the others as it takes place across 3 racecourses. These are called the main group 1 races. The three race courses are Caulfield Racecourse, Geelong Racecourse and Moonee Valley Racecourse. 

The racing kicks off at Caulfield Carnival, which involves three Group 1 races including, the Caulfield Cup, the Caulfield Thousand Guineas and the Caulfield Guineas. 

Then we are over to the Geelong Carnival. This is a two-day festival which has two major events, the Weight for Age Cox Plate and, more famously, the Gold Cup.

The final one is the Victoria Racing Club. This gets in a lot of meetings and features the biggest race in Australia, the Melbourne Cup.

This event is a massive moment in Australia and the prize money reflects this, with last year’s prize pool being $8.41 million (12,703,389,100.00 Nigerian Naira).

Overall

As we have already said, the amount of eyes that are on horse racing is a massive factor as to why it is shown and played all around the world. The amount of money that goes into horse racing is astonishing. From the prize fund, the maintenance and paying for the drinks and food for the attendees are very expensive.

All this money is exactly why they need a lot of eyes on the sport. If Horse Racing didn’t have a lot of attention then the sport would be spending more than it would earn and that is very bad for business.

Overall, we think that horse racing will continue to grow and more events will pop up all over the world and people will give more money to go and watch the big horse racing festivals which will result in horse racing growing.