End of sporting era as Investec cuts ties

Nothing lasts for ever and, after 21 years as a major sponsor, Investec has departed the British sporting landscape, with the announcement that it is pulling out of sponsoring the Derby, Oaks and Coronation Cup at Epsom – a £2million-a-year deal – with six years of its contract to run.

The company with the zebra logo, a reminder of its South African roots, sponsored the autumn rugby internationals from 1999 to 2011 and the Great Britain women’s hockey team from 2011 to May 2020. Both contracts went full term.

But, having sponsored Test cricket from 2012, Investec pulled out in 2017 with four years left to run when the England and Wales Cricket Board sold the shirt sponsorship to a rival bank, Natwest, without consulting it, allowing it to operate a break clause.

That blip apart, I dare say there have been few more symbiotic relationships between sponsor and sport in those two decades. In 1999, the bank from the tip of Africa was virtually unknown. Now, few people will not have heard of Investec, and many will actually bank with it.

The Derby was a particular beneficiary. Investec stepped in at short notice in 2009. Vodafone had pulled out following the 2008 race and, in the corporate world, the race appeared friendless when in April that year the Jockey Club announced it would be run without a sponsor.

Investec got a good deal on that race, won by Sea The Stars, but for its part it boosted prize money to something more commensurate with the Derby’s standing as the world’s greatest race, and it took the race off the sports pages on to billboards beside the A4 and into Underground stations. Its glamorous ambassadors took it into fashion magazines and it restored the race’s self-esteem. All that was Investec, not the racecourse.

But its departure mirrors that of Vodafone, its predecessor. When the top man, in this case Bernard

Kantor, one of its founder fathers, whose passion for horse racing was driving this particular train, retired, the situation was always likely to be reviewed.

That was the case with Vodafone when Sir Christopher Gent, who had horses with Richard Hannon, and Ernie Harrison, a member of the Jockey Club, both retired from the communications giant. It was not long before it was no longer the Vodafone Derby.

Kantor started the bank in South Africa with “three chairs, four phones and five people”. The last man arriving in the morning had to go out on the street selling. He oversaw its growth into a global investment bank and, though the sponsorship budgets for 2009 had long since been arranged, he answered a telephone call from Epsom about six weeks before the race and saw it as a massive opportunity.

When they write the next history of the Derby, I hope they portray Kantor as one of the race’s knights in shining armour, the one who came riding over Tattenham hill on a zebra.

A South African by birth, he always said it had been a privilege to maintain “this little bit of history and treat it with the respect it deserves”. But he also never forgot he was running a business. “We’re quite tough on these decisions,” he said.

At about the same time he signed up for the Derby, he was presented with a Manchester United shirt with “Investec” emblazoned on the front. The price tag would have been £15 million. “I’d rather do the Derby 20 times over,” he said.

Of course, as Investec heads in another direction, there may be some in racing thinking along the same lines as Kenny Rogers when he sang, with some irony: “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, with four hungry children and a crop in the field.”

The Jockey Club has a dozen hungry children on its hands at the moment, while racing is still taking place behind closed doors and is having to renegotiate deals with sponsors on all fronts, having failed – through no fault of its own – to give the exposure expected.

It will, doubtless, receive some sort of compensation from Investec for the breach of contract but, in the present climate, finding a replacement, even for the world’s greatest Flat race, is not going to be easy. Nothing lasts for ever and racing will hope that includes the vacant slot for a new Derby sponsor.

In 1999, the bank from the tip of Africa was virtually unknown. Now, few people will not have heard of Investec