'People think bookmakers just want race on top of race. No, we don't!'

When it comes to British racing's fixture list, it is not hard to find clashes of interests between the sport's many and varied stakeholders.

Racecourses, participants, bookmakers, the public and the governing body all have their own ideas about how it should look and they do not always tally up.

The most obvious area is the sheer volume of fixtures, an area where size really does matter. The number of fixtures scheduled in Britain expanded from 989 in 1986 to 1,504 in 2008, and the figure has not deviated far from that total in the intervening period.