Television exposure has helped racing business boom during pandemic
Unprecedented television coverage of horse racing during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant gains in business metrics for both networks and betting companies affiliated with racing over the past five months, according to officials of the New York Racing Association and the FOX family of television networks.
The officials, who appeared on a teleconference call on Thursday to discuss an upcoming live broadcast of the Travers Stakes on Saturday from NYRA’s Saratoga Race Course, said that racing’s ability to hold live events during the pandemic has led television networks to deepen their relationship with the sport during a time when most major sports were sent to the sidelines due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’s executive vice president of research, league operations, and strategy, said on the conference call that the network’s numbers for its horse racing broadcasts this year have been “through the roof.” Fox has had a partnership with the New York Racing Association to broadcast its live races for several years, but this year, that relationship has deepened as Fox and other networks lost access to other sports.
“I don’t think you can overstate how important it’s been to have that live-event content,” Mulvihill said, referring to horse racing.
This year, the vast majority of the live broadcasts of NYRA’s races were moved from Fox’s FS2 to FS1, Mulvihill said, reflecting the open broadcast windows made available by the pandemic. Because FS1 has a larger distribution network, that has led to a quadrupling of a metric the company uses called “total consumption” for its racing broadcasts compared to last year, Mulvihill said.
“We think that’s carried over to a positive impact on handle as well,” Mulvihill said. The total consumption number, which measures the number of viewers multiplied by the minutes the viewers have watched the broadcasts, has jumped from 365 million minutes at this point last year to 1.4 billion minutes this year, Mulvihill said.
Handle on horse racing has been remarkably robust during the pandemic, especially on a per-race basis. On Wednesday, Equibase reported that total handle on U.S. horse races was up nearly 17 percent in July when compared to July last year, even though U.S. racetracks held 462 fewer races this July compared to last year.
While comparisons between this year and last year can be considered specious due to the massive disruptions impacting all aspects of the U.S. economy, the July numbers seem to bolster the case that horse racing has benefited from being one of the few sports available during the pandemic, at a time when many casinos were also closed. While per-race betting figures have been remarkably strong throughout the pandemic, the July figures were the first to show an overall growth in horse-race betting on a monthly basis since the spread of coronavirus in March led to massive shutdowns across the country.
Because most racetracks are operating spectator-free, nearly all of the betting currently taking place on racing has come through the vast number of account-wagering platforms that are available to many horseplayers. [DRF owns and operates its own account-wagering platform]. All of those account-wagering companies have reported significant handle gains over the past four months, a reflection, in large part, of the migration from on-track and off-track sources that had previously accounted for a substantial portion of the total betting on the sport.
For example, handle and the number of customer accounts at the New York Racing Association’s account-wagering platform has been up “triple digits” this year, said Tony Allevato, the president of NYRA Bets, who appeared on the conference call with Mulvihill. Allevato said that initial analyses of the new activity indicate that many of the new accounts have been opened by bettors who may be new to the sport.
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“What we’re seeing is that they’re betting smaller amounts. They are not the traditional horse racing bettors we have always had,” Allevato said. “It looks like we’re bringing more casual fans to the game.”
Allevato declined to provide specific figures, citing the association’s policies.
Across the account-wagering landscape, operators that hub at least a portion of their remote handle through the Oregon Racing Commission reported $1.92 billion in bets in the second quarter of 2020, compared to $1.31 billion in the second quarter of last year, a gain of 46.6 percent, according to figures reported by the commission.
Live television coverage of a race has been shown to be a significant driver of handle in the past. TVG, the horse-race broadcasting company and account-wagering operator, has distributed data throughout the years indicating that races shown live on its television network typically draw far more in betting than races that are not. In the second quarter, TVG's handle more than doubled, jumping from $355.9 million last year to $762.1 million this year.
The Travers broadcast on Saturday will be shown on Fox’s flagship network for the second year in a row, running this year from 5:00 p.m. Eastern to 6:30 p.m. Prior to that program, coverage of the races at Saratoga will start at 11:30 a.m. Eastern on FS1 and move to FS2 at 3:00 p.m. A Travers wrap-up show will follow the main broadcast on FS2.
Mulvihill said that the presence of the Travers on the main network at a time when most major sports have returned to live play shows the company’s commitment to racing. “The broadcast network is our jewel platform,” Mulvihill said. “It’s where all our important events live.”
For the Travers broadcast, Fox won’t be resorting to any of the audio or visual bells and whistles that have accompanied the return of other major sports, such as fake crowd noise or auxiliary broadcast windows for remote fans. But the crowd shots that normally show thousands of fans mingling in the tree-filled backyard or crowding the apron below the Saratoga grandstand’s “gold-capped pinnacles” – to use a term coined by the architect Paul Roberts – will likely be conspicuous by their absence.
“We’re not trying to hide from the fact that we’re spectator-less,” Allevato said. “But it is a bit of a challenge when you’re not able to cut away to a shot of families enjoying themselves in the picnic area.”
Mulvihill said that Fox wants to stick to the script that has brought the company success over the past five months.
“It’s obviously the year of enormous experimentation across all sports,” Mulvihill said. “But what we’ve seen on the Saratoga shows is working very well. I don’t think we need to do anything different for the Travers show.”