Champions Day has an established seat at the sport's top table

Racing in 2010 was suffering, not for the first time, something of an existential crisis.

The sport, fearing itself to be in serious demographic decline, launched an industry-wide initiative designed to modernise racing, expand its public appeal and safeguard its future. The modernisers' early efforts were often as tame as they proved short-lived – decimal odds at racecourses, anyone? – but ambition, as it turned out that year, was not in short supply.

British Champions Day, announced in a blaze of publicity and controversy six years ago, was the most radical and expensive race fixture ever created in the British racing calendar. It aimed to give the sport what it had never had before: an end-of-season finale to the Flat season, something to rival the racing olympiads of France's Arc meeting or the Breeders' Cup in America.