Horse racing enjoyed a jump in television coverage over the last year, and it wasn’t only because a horse was contending for the Triple Crown.
Just three years ago, only five horse racing programs were on mainstream sports television, outside of the sport’s major events — three Triple Crown races and the two days of the Breeders’ Cup World Championships. Now, thanks to a pair of series launched by NBC and Fox Sports 1, 21 horse racing programs are offered on television.
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The Jockey Club Gold Cup (above) at Belmont Park was one of the events featured in NBC’s horse racing series.
Photo by: AP Images |
This year NBC launched an 11-program racing series called “The Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series: Win and You’re In” that featured races in which horses competed for berths in this year’s Breeders’ Cup races.
The results, said Jon Miller, president of programming for NBC Sports Group, were better than expected. The series aired on NBC and NBC Sports Network and drew 7.2 million viewers overall.
The series made business sense for NBC because it provided a programming bridge between the last Triple Crown race in June and this week’s Breeders’ Cup coverage. NBC owns the rights to broadcast horse racing’s major events: the Triple Crown races — the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes — in the spring, and the Breeders’ Cup, which will air on NBC Sports Network on Friday, and NBCSN and NBC on Saturday.
The NBC series ran from June 7 to Oct. 5 and featured races in which the winning horse earned an automatic berth in one of this week’s 13 Breeders’ Cup races, which have purses of between $1 million and $5 million.
NBC was fortunate this year in that California Chrome won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, and had a shot at the Triple Crown, which boosted ratings for the three races and especially the third, the Belmont. California Chrome, who finished fourth in the Belmont, is scheduled to run in the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Saturday night on NBC.
“Coming off the potential Triple Crown, you know, with the Belmont this year, we had unbelievable numbers,”
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The Sword Dancer Invitational Stakes at Saratoga was among the races shown in The Jockey Club series on Fox Sports 1.
Photo by: NYRA / Adam Coglianese |
Miller said. “We had this huge audience, and shame on us if we didn’t try to find a way to extend the brand, which we were able to do. We had a very successful [series] this summer and leading into the Breeders’ Cup, it’s done everything we could have hoped for and then some. Now we are looking at an unbelievable Breeders’ Cup.”
NBC is scheduled to run the series again in 2015. Although plans are not set to expand the series, Miller said, there is no thought of reducing it.
FS1, which launched in August 2013, started a new racing series in partnership with industry trade organization The Jockey Club. The series, called “The Jockey Club Tour on Fox,” featured 10 races from around the U.S. and Canada, as well as the Dubai World Cup from the United Arab Emirates. The series started with the Donn Handicap on Feb. 9 at Gulfstream and concluded with the Ricoh Woodbine Mile on Sept. 14.
“My hope was simply that the Jockey Club Tour would rate similarly to our network average, and in fact the series exceeded that goal,” said Mike Mulvihill, FS1 senior vice president of programming and research. The shows averaged 123,000 viewers, which was a bit better than what the network averaged on a total day basis during those same months.
“Our Jockey Club ratings were on par with ratings for college basketball and the UEFA Champions League, and that’s good news for racing because those are both very important properties for FS1,” Mulvihill said. “If you total up the live airings and replays on all platforms, we generated roughly 2.5 million impressions, which I think is encouraging for a new package on a new network.”
Jason Wilson, vice president of business development of The Jockey Club, said the 2.5 million views was a pleasant surprise. “We said we would be happy with an audience of about 2 million people, this being the first year of this series,” Wilson said.
Both Wilson and Mulvihill said there was a chance of expanding the series next year, although plans are not complete.
The Jockey Club partnered with FS1 to put the show together after research firm McKinsey & Co., hired by The Jockey Club to do a comprehensive economic study on the sport, suggested that there be more live coverage of horse racing, in addition to racing-only channels TVG and HRTV, to help increase the overall fan base of the sport.
TVG and HRTV offer 24-hour coverage of the sport, but those channels cater to the core audience of horse racing fans who regularly attend races.
Bhavesh Patel, senior vice president of television operations and marketing for TVG, which is in 36 million U.S. homes, said the channel welcomes the added coverage on more mainstream networks and sports networks. “The more we can do to raise awareness and televise any live sport outside a core audience to a mainstream audience, the more the sport can grow,” he said.
Miller at NBC noted there are encouraging signs for the sport, including that 44 million people watched NBC’s coverage of the three Triple Crown races this year. That is an increase of 13 percent over 2008, the last time a Triple Crown victory was at stake.
Sports media consultant Ed Desser noted that one of the problems with producing horse racing is that it is expensive, because racetracks are so much larger than playing fields for sporting events such as football, baseball and soccer. Most major racetracks are one mile around; the track at Belmont Park, where the Belmont Stakes is run, is a mile and a half.
Desser recalled that in the 1960s, horse racing, boxing and the NFL were the most watched sporting events on television.
“That gives you a sense of what is possible when it is properly produced, properly distributed, properly promoted,” Desser said. Going forward, Desser said, the goal for horse racing is: “To try to get back to the golden era.”
“The negative is it takes a while to turn around a battleship,” Desser said. “The turn is in process but it takes a while before it’s apparent to everybody. I think the pendulum is swinging. It’s swinging back in the right direction.”
