CHICAGO (Dow Jones) -- It may be the biggest sporting event you've never heard of.
Over the course of four days this week, about 230,000 people will gather on a small parcel of the English countryside for the Cheltenham Festival to watch 500 horses jump their way through 25 races. And they, along with bettors at home across Great Britain and Ireland, will wager almost $1 billion on the races -- more than three times the entire global handle of Kentucky Derby Day and the Breeder's Cup combined.
Several million more will watch the festival on TV in pubs, clubs and betting shops as it builds toward the biggest race of the week: Friday's Totesport Gold Cup with returning champion Kauto Star and its million-pound purse.
Jump-racing, or steeplechase racing as some call it, while virtually unknown here is big business in the U.K., attracting massive crowds, corporate sponsorships and thousands upon thousands of wagers.
"Outside of the Grand National, Cheltenham is the biggest betting week of the year," said Ciaran O'Brien, a spokesman for bookmaker Ladbrokes . "It's the showcase of the industry."
Ladbrokes and chief competitor William Hill together own more than a third of the country's estimated 10,000 betting shops. There is at least one on almost every main street, making wagering fast, easy and ubiquitous. And racing has little of the competition from casinos that has helped put so many U.S. horse tracks on a downward slide. Consider: There are 52 racetracks in the U.K. and barely 100 here (depending how they are counted) but the U.S. has six times the population and nearly 40 times the land area.
"It is a huge, huge business in the U.K," said Brooks Pierce, president of Scientific Games Racing. (SGMS) "Racing is probably 50% of all wagering there."
And if the betting is bigger over there, he added it is also "fundamentally very different in that by far the majority of the handle comes from fixed-odds. It is really the only market in the world [like that]."
At American racetracks, pari-mutual racing rules the day, in which bettors essentially wager against one another, with the track (and taxing authorities) taking a cut before the money is paid out. But in Britain, bookies set the odds and take the bets, more like the way U.S. casinos handle betting on sporting events.
Pierce also noted that while the majority of the betting in the U.S. is on " exotics", i.e exactas, trifectas, quinellas, etc., "75% of it in the U.K.
