Final British attendance figures for 2022 show 14.4 per cent fall from 2019

The final reckoning for 2022 racecourse attendance in Britain confirms that the sport suffered a 14.4 per cent decline compared to the last comparable year in 2019, with 4.81 million individual visits to the track.

While a bumper festive period saw a rise of 6.4 per cent compared to the equivalent fixtures in that pre-Covid year of 2019, that was more than offset by the loss of key meetings due to the weather at the start of the month, including consecutive Saturdays at Cheltenham and Ascot.

To put that decline in context, British racecourses welcomed just under 6.13m people in 2015, a number which had already slipped to 5.62m in 2019.