Jim Hay’s fascination with horseracing has its roots in a childhood growing up in the South Lanarkshire mining village of Caldercruix. Thanks to the intervention of his grandmother, he would inadvertently become fascinated with the sport.
The Chairman of Dubai-based JMH Group went on to enjoy a hugely successful business career, which included 27 years working for BP. That enabled him and wife Fitri to become significant owners both in Britain and on the international stage since they bought their first two horses, trained by Kevin McAullife, in 2001.
Their silks have been carried to multiple Group 1 successes in the US and they have enjoyed important wins in Dubai and South Africa, while in June their gelding Khaadem won the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot for the second year running.
In terms of satisfaction, that victory came close to matching the day the Hays’ colours were carried to victory by Fame And Glory in the 2011 Gold Cup.
clear and unambiguous
Jim Hay’s love of and commitment to British racing remains absolute. He insists “it will always be the core” of his involvement. Yet he is unable to hide his frustration regarding the sport’s financial landscape, which he describes as “dire”.
Last year that vexation prompted Hay to commission a deep dive into the sport’s economics by the CT Group of Sir Lynton Crosby, the Australia-born campaign strategist associated with some of the Conservative Party’s biggest electoral successes this century, who has also advised corporate organisations around the world on how to achieve their goals.
Hay distributed the study to some of the sport’s biggest players, including Coolmore, Juddmonte and Shadwell, big bookmaker groups, and the BHA.
He believes the issue the report uncovered is clear and unambiguous. Acting on it, however, is less straightforward.
“It is blindingly obvious what we have to do, but there are too many opinions and vested interests,” explains Hay, who is talking at his apartment in Belgravia, one of London’s most exclusive districts.
“It took us ages to get an idea about how big media rights are – and they are much higher than you see reported.
“There is a huge amount of money, but it is all going into the racetracks and they are keeping it. The big owner groups all understood what the problems are, and they all want to get them rectified and fixed.
“Look at the Premier League and media rights – that’s what funds the tremendous amount of money in football. It goes back into the clubs whereas in racing these media rights somehow seem to evaporate.
“None of this is new but there are so many divided constituencies. I think [BHA Chair] Joe Saumarez Smith has done a valiant job against all odds, but it is not easy.
“The BHA is utterly dysfunctional because the people it is supposed to regulate actually fund it. That’s okay, they can fund it, but the funding should go into a government department which should then distribute it so the BHA cannot be influenced.”
it is not the bookmakers’ fault
Unlike many of his fellow owners, the one body not in Hay’s crosshairs for the sport’s financial plight are bookmakers.
“Don’t go blaming them, it is not the bookmakers’ fault,” Hay says. “I have said to the bookies, ‘Why don’t you publish the numbers and say this is how the cake is being divided up?’ It is not going where it should go.
“Bookmakers in the UK have overheads – they have every right to run their businesses and make a profit from it. I have no problem with that.
“We have had horses in America since around 2007 and we have never put money into training fees there. Our capital outlay was in sending the horseflesh. Our winnings have paid for all our training costs there.
“In contrast, we had our best winnings total here last year and won almost £1.2 million. That didn’t even cover 40 per cent of our UK training costs.
“Mrs Hay was the fourth top owner in Dubai this year and we paid for everything with the prize-money. Again, the only capital outlay was getting the horse there.
“British racing’s ownership structure is hanging by a thread. You can’t keep imagining someone new is going to keep coming in.
“Take Sheikh Mohammed, maybe his sons aren’t quite so enthusiastic about horseracing as he is. What happens if his family say we have had enough of this? It came very close with Shadwell if Sheikha Hissa hadn’t stepped in.”
prestige
Following the agreement of an £800m deal to sell his global construction chemical manufacturer Fosroc to French company Saint-Gobain, Hay says once international regulatory approval has been signed off, he and Fitri will once again be predominantly based in Dubai.
His racing operation will diversify, with plans to send horses to compete in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia as well as beef up his team in Dubai, where he predicts an upgrade in the programme after officials at Meydan realised they had to respond to growing competition from their Middle Eastern neighbours.
However, the safety rope that keeps British racing clinging to the mountain is the reputation for prestige, which it still manages to maintain.
That advantage in developing horses like his 2023 2,000 Guineas third Royal Scotsman, who is recuperating from injury after easily winning the Diomed Stakes at Epsom in June, into stallions means most of the Hays’ string will remain here.
He says: “Without winning top-class races here we can’t make him a stallion. The UK must remain the core because of the prestige of winning here. Nothing anywhere compares to Royal Ascot.
“You only have to look at what Coolmore does. If it was all about prize-money they would only be running in America, but they recognise to have a Galileo or a Sadler’s Wells, these animals have to have won the Derby or top-class Group 1 race in Britain.
“It took Prince Khalid 50 years to get Frankel, but he knew he had to win here with him. The only way to make this thing make sense is the breeding – you have to get involved.”
How Hay got involved in racing is quite a tale. He and the sport must thank his maternal grandmother Mary Wilson.
Hay recalls: “The nearest connection my family has to horses was my maternal grandfather. He was in a cavalry regiment in the First World War and was in the last ever cavalry charge in Jordan.
“His regiment charged these Turkish machine gunners. He survived.
I had to be fast
“My maternal grandmother was fanatical about mental arithmetic. She was very Presbyterian, so gambling was a big no-no, but she had the only TV in our family so on Saturday I would watch the racing with her.
“We would pretend to bet – half a crown each-way at 100-8 comes third, what’s the returns?
“She had a metal ruler for sewing and I would get whacked, so I had to be fast. It was a very smart way to teach you mental arithmetic, but she inadvertently hooked me on horseracing.
“I became as interested in the thoroughbreds as I was in the maths. I became addicted listening to Peter Bromley and Peter O’Sullevan and became fascinated with the horses themselves.”
By the time he was 14-years-old, Hay was chalking the board in his local bookies.
“I would be in there at half past seven on a Saturday morning writing up all the first races,” he says. “Only the bookmaker and I could hear the commentary so I would then chalk up the odds.
“Around half past two, the pub emptied, and they all came in to drink in the bookies. If the favourite got beat, you had to dodge the bottles!
“At the end of the day I would help the bookie settle up. I could have become a bookmaker but my mother [also Mary] frowned upon that idea so I was very carefully steered away from it.”
It probably didn’t need his mother’s intervention. Hay insists he has always been “more comfortable on the other side of the rails”, adding: “It has always been a great intellectual competition for me, trying to outwit the bookmakers.”
It was a challenge he took extremely seriously.
“In my teens, I was reading everything that Phil Bull was writing about in Timeform”
“By the time I was in my teens, I was reading everything that Phil Bull was writing about in Timeform,” Hay says. “He hooked me on the mathematical idea about form and how you could outsmart the bookmaker.
“I couldn’t afford a Timeform Black Book apart from the one they produced just before Royal Ascot.
“I would save up for that one and then use it, updating the ratings every day from the results. I had managed to work out how Bull and Timeform produced the ratings, so as long as I got the times, distances and weights I could update them. I basically had my own Timeform Black Book.
“When I was gambling seriously before we owned horses, if I was going to have a serious bet, I would be looking at the form the night before and then be up at 5am in the morning if I had to make a decision by 11am.
“I would spend six hours on one race. I made it pay. When I was doing it properly my strike rate was 40 per cent.
“Winning races now [as an owner] is a big enough thrill but I still do bet on them. I am superstitious. If I don’t think they are going to win, who will believe in them?”
Hay has always had belief in Khaadem, the eight-year-old gelding he bought from Shadwell.
“These are the days you remember”
His 2023 Royal Ascot win, at odds of 80-1, in the hands of trusted ally Jamie Spencer was sweet but Hay seemed to get even more satisfaction from this year’s victory, this time under Oisin Murphy.
“I was interviewed for TV and said, ‘Do no ignore this horse. He loves Ascot and will love the firm ground. He is amazingly talented when he wants to be,’ Hay says.
“It was very satisfying to win again it despite the pundits saying he was not a Group 1 horse. These are the days you remember.”
The 20-1 victory of Andrew Balding’s Here Comes When in the 2017 Sussex Stakes, run in monsoon-like conditions at Glorious Goodwood, makes Hay smile – “We knew he would be in the first three because he loved running in a bog and he was 80-1 in the morning!” – but perhaps the sweetest memory of all was Fame And Glory’s Gold Cup win.
He says: “That day we were in the royal procession with the Queen and had lunch at Windsor Castle.
“She was over the moon because we were the first guests of the monarch whose horse had won the race.
“My wife is incredibly competitive and believes a good loser is an oxymoron. There is no such thing – the jockeys and trainers are acutely aware of this. It is not an easy day for them at Ascot or Goodwood because there is huge pressure – they know how important these races are to my wife.”
The purchase of a half-share in Fame And Glory came through his association with Coolmore.
A similar arrangement that year with Cape Blanco resulted in three top-level successes in the US, including the Man O’War Stakes and Arlington Million, while Deauville, a 50-50 share product of Coolmore’s Galileo and the Hays’ mare Walklikeanegyptian, won the 2016 Grade 1 Belmont Derby Invitational Stakes.
Hay adds: “I have always been associated with Coolmore and they have been incredibly supportive and kind to us. Some of our best mares were sold to me by Paul Shanahan. We take a lot of advice from him and MV [Magnier] and John himself.
“Our relationship has been going for 15 years – and it will keep going.”
The same can confidently be said of the Hay racing empire.
Big hopes at home and overseas
Jim Hay and wife Fitri hope that in juvenile Wolf Of Badenoch they have bred a horse that can ensure their continued participation in Britain’s top races.
The Hugo Palmer-trained son of first-season sire Pinatubo, who is out of the Hays’ dual winning mare Miss Latin, was a striking winner of a seven-furlong Doncaster maiden in June under Jamie Spencer and has already been handed Group 1 race entries.
Hay says: “Hugo had told me he was potentially good. It is early days, but he was very relaxed. Jamie thinks he is a bit special and said he went ‘whoosh’ at Doncaster.”
Wolf Of Badenoch is one of 25 two-year-olds the Hays have in Britain, almost half of them homebred.
In all they have around 50 Flat horses in training in Britain, including Nunthorpe Stakes possible Starlust, which have run for ten different trainers this year, plus a small team of jump horses.
The Derby remains the race Hay would love to win most of all, but in an effort to make an impact in dirt races like the Dubai World Cup, Hay, advised by Alex Cole, has been working on a plan.
He explains: “We have invested quite heavily in [stallions] Justify and Gun Runner and they don’t come cheap.
“The turf horses we have in the US tend to go to Graham Motion and we have [2022 Man O’War Stakes winner] Highland Chief with him. But the dirt-bred ones go to Wesley Ward and we have ten with him at the minute.”
Hay credits “walking pedigree book” Cole with the execution of last season’s plan to purchase Ancient Rome, a son of War Front. Bought out of the Andre Fabre stable, he was successfully targeted at the Mint Millions Stakes at Kentucky Downs last September. Because Ancient Rome is a Kentucky-bred, the $1m first prize was doubled.
The Charlie Hills-trained five-year-old, who was second in the Group 2 Summer Mile at Ascot on July 13, is booked in for another shot at the Kentucky prize next month.
