Horse racing gifts

Racing gifts divide cleanly into two kinds: things for a day at the races, and things about a particular horse. Nearly everything sold under this heading is the first kind — hip flasks, binoculars, race-day accessories, a gift card for a meeting. This page is the second kind.

The silks are the gift, and they are not decoration

If there is one image that belongs on a racing enthusiast’s wall it is a set of colours, and most people do not realise that colours in Britain are a registered asset with a rulebook behind them. The British Horseracing Authority is explicit that “each registration of racing colours is required to be unique”, and the guidelines that enforce it are far stranger than anyone selling racing merchandise lets on.

Some combinations are simply forbidden. “Any combination of BLACK, DARK BLUE, DARK GREEN or PURPLE will not be permitted in new registrations” — not for taste, but because at four furlongs in poor light nobody can tell them apart. Seams on sleeves do not count as a distinguishing feature. Neither, normally, does the cap: “All fresh applications for new Racing Colours must have a unique body and sleeve design”.

The exception is the one worth knowing if you are buying for a family. “The spouse (including common law partners), child, parent or grandchild of a registrant may register the same colours provided a differentiating cap is registered.” Colours pass down a family, in other words, but each generation must wear a different hat. And when a set lapses it does not vanish — “All colour combinations which lapse will be available for re-registration following a three-month moratorium”, so a set can be inherited by a stranger three months after somebody stops paying for it.

Which is the argument for printing them. A set of colours is a small, finite, registered thing that belonged to one family, and it reproduces beautifully because it was designed to be legible at distance.

For the owner or the syndicate member

Racehorse ownership is mostly syndicates now, and syndicate members are the most under-served gift recipients in the sport: they have a share in a horse, a genuine emotional stake, and nothing in the house to show for it. A print of the horse, or of the colours it runs in, is the obvious answer and almost nobody gives it.

For the racing family, or the horse that mattered

The other reliable gift is the horse itself — a good photograph from a race day, printed properly rather than left on a phone. Winner’s enclosure shots, the parade ring, a grey in the closing stages. Race-day photographs are usually taken at distance in poor light, so check the resolution before ordering anything large.

The name, and why racing names read the way they do

A racehorse’s name is regulated as tightly as its colours, which is why they read like telegrams. Weatherbys allows a maximum of eighteen characters including spaces and punctuation, and roughly three thousand names are protected outright and never return. The full rules, and a generator that works within them, are on our horse name generator.

Jumps or Flat: they are not the same follower

Ask which before you buy anything. British racing runs two sports under one name and people tend to belong firmly to one of them.

National Hunt — the jumps — runs through the winter and builds to the Cheltenham Festival in March and the Grand National in April. Its horses are older, race for years, and become genuinely famous to the people who follow them; a jumps follower can usually name a favourite horse from a decade ago. That makes the horse itself the right subject for a gift.

The Flat runs through the summer, the horses are younger and many are gone to stud before anyone gets attached. Flat followers attach to trainers, jockeys and the big meetings more than to individual animals, so the colours or the meeting tend to travel better than a portrait.

Point-to-point is the amateur, grassroots end of jump racing, run mostly by hunts on farmland over the winter and spring. Its followers are frequently riders themselves, and often know the horse and the family that owns it personally — which makes a named print land in a way it would not for a Flat spectator.

Most racing fans do not own a horse

Worth stating, because it changes the answer. The overwhelming majority of people who love racing follow it rather than participate in it: they have a favourite horse, a course they go to, a meeting they never miss, and no animal of their own to photograph.

For them the personalised routes mostly do not apply, and the honest recommendation is a print of something they already love rather than something we make specific to them. If the horse is famous enough that they would recognise it on a wall, a straight photographic print of it is a better gift than anything with their own name on it.

What we do not sell

Worth saying, because most of the results for this search are something else entirely. We print pictures. We do not sell race-day experiences, tickets, hospitality, hip flasks, binoculars or racing silks themselves. If a day out is what you want, the racecourse groups sell gift cards and they are a better buy than anything we make.

Timing, if it is for Christmas

Demand for racing gifts runs at roughly a third of its December level through the summer and peaks hard in the run-up to Christmas, then the sport’s own calendar takes over — the jumps season builds through the winter to the Festival in March and the National in April. Anything made to order needs to be ordered before the rush rather than during it; the dates are on the Christmas gift guide.

Written by Craig Fearn, Stable & Hoof.