TAPE IT, MIC IT UP AND PACKAGE IT: WHY TV CAN WORK FOR HORSE RACING

by Dean Towers

I’m one of those people in modern society who catches up on work at night. The day is busy, and at times wasteful, with calls, emails, texts, BBM’s (sorry, I do have a Blackberry, which probably dates me) and just about everything else. So when our household goes to bed, I try and get things done. 

While working, I often like to keep something on in the background, and one time not long ago I began to surf the sports channels, looking for a game or event to listen to. Being in Canada, this more than likely involves the sport of hockey, but this past winter, I found myself glued to the set for another sport. It was the sport of curling. 

Yes, curling, where men and women (sometimes overweight or age-challenged) play a form of shuffleboard on ice. Here’s where you may say, “ah, those crazy Canadians.” If so, I can’t disagree on some of the stereotypes, but if you keep reading, I promise this will make sense. 

The thing is, curling has become massively popular on television north of the border. At the national championships (which I was watching on tape delay), the ratings were absolutely astounding. For a regular game–not the final four or the final itself–almost 700,000 people were watching on Canada’s “ESPN.” That same evening, 717,000 people were watching an NHL hockey game on the main network between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Pittsburgh Penguins. That’s tantamount, in the U.S., to a Pats-Broncos game drawing 8 or 9 million viewers on CBS, with ESPN’s coverage of a shuffleboard game directly against it drawing 7 million. 
“It really is a phenomenal story,” TSN president Stewart Johnson told the Edmonton Sun. “We now consider curling a pillar property on TSN. It’s become a ratings powerhouse year after year.”

I bring up curling for a few reasons. Curling is a game that no one really knows. It’s not mainstream, and it has a lot of down time between shots. No one knows who the players are; no one has a rooting interest in any of the teams, really. It’s a niche sport, whose viewers skew older and it is a game predicated on some really cool strategy. It’s cerebral. It’s also grown from a sport that was rarely watched, to a “powerhouse.” 

What curling has taken advantage of is marketing to its strengths. It has not tried to be baseball or football or hockey, because it is not baseball or football or hockey. It’s not fast-paced or flashy like a half pipe. It’s, well, curling.

“The athletes, themselves, likely hold a key. Putting microphones on them has opened up the strategy of the game, undoubtedly. More than that, it has shown them to be mostly well-tempered, ordinary folk who just happen to be very, very good at the game they love. They’re polite, good-natured and sporting. They all seem like good neighbours. That’s an attractive island in the world of sports, dominated by a sea of ego and brashness,” wrote Don Landry on Yahoo Sports.

Horse racing, unlike curling, has not transferred itself to television well at all. Yes, the Triple Crown’s ratings are good because they are a formidable brand, but the rest of the year it costs the business money to be on television, not the other way around. If you talk to a hundred people in the sport of racing, they’ll tell you it’s great to be on TV, but they are also very perplexed that no one seems to be watching. It’s the elephant in the room and not a soul seems to know what to do about it. 
Racing wants to sell itself on TV as spine-tingling excitement, and that sells well to us as insiders and fans. After all, the hairs stand up on our necks when we see Rachel Alexandra winning by 20, Queen Z mowing down a field with mind-boggling skill, or Sunday Silence, “holding on in a racing epic.” It also makes us feel big-league and warm and fuzzy to hold live events. The problem is that the general public does not feel the same way. Rachel, Zenyatta and Sunday Silence are brown horses that they can’t follow on a TV screen, and after the race they probably have no idea what they just watched. They might never even see them race again and most don’t seem to care either way. Judging by the ratings and reaction, they certainly aren’t seeing what we’re all seeing. 

I believe that for the sport to move forward on television it has to change the way it is presented on television. Instead of showing live events people don’t seem to be interested in, don’t understand, which doesn’t make them want to become repeat viewers, racing should try and create something they will be interested in and understand, and maybe watch again. 

I’d “tape it, mic it up and package it.” 

For example:

For last month’s Santa Anita Derby, when Game on Dude took no prisoners, never let anyone close and ran away with it in a huge effort, imagine what that would have looked like had it been packaged like a live event, but shown later. 

Bob Baffert, mic’d up, might’ve said this to Mike Smith in the paddock: “Mike, you know we were short last time, but we’re ready today. I don’t care if Joel or anyone else comes after you and you have to go 22, 44, just hold the lead and let’s win this thing. ”

Mike Smith: “Don’t worry. No one is getting by us today.”

Joel Rosario, in the next shot, mic’d up discussing strategy: “I’m not sure boss, Mike won’t give up the lead with Dude, will he. Maybe I should sit chilly instead of pushing the pace?”

Kathy Ritvo, trainer of Mucho Macho Man mic’d up: “I am not sure how we’re going to run. He seemed to be a little more on his toes at Gulfstream.”

The scene could then switch to the “Horseplayers,” say a Christian Hellmers speaking to a confidante for his last play for a whack of money in a daily tournament. 

“I watched Dude work last week and this horse is ready,” he might say.

Peter Rotondo, or whomever, could be mic’d up behind him saying with incredulity, “Hellmers has been eating too much yogurt.”

What you’d have is not a pre-race show about what might happen in a horse race from talking heads, a story about a feed man who has been working since 1943, or a feature on something tangential–the usual TV stuff that has not gotten ratings in like forever–you have real life. Real racing. 

And then, they’re off…

The race, the riders, the trainers and the people who bet on them are all suddenly a World Series of Poker pocket cam. The general public gets to watch a race unfold; the strategy of Mike Smith taking and holding a lead, Mucho Macho Man not firing like he did before, and Hellmers being right, with Rotondo being a wrong, but well-dressed bettor. 

Post-race reaction could be packaged, the telecast would show the prices, analysis or what have you, just like a live race would. It’d be like a TV show, with a prologue, middle and epilogue that makes eminent sense to any sports fan, in a live-event setting. We’d know the show was not a live event, but others sure wouldn’t. 
I think that would move racing towards a TV sport like curling, by creating fans in the strategy of the sport. It would not be a sport with shadowy figures no one knows; it would not be a game dependant only on animals running a race that lasts two minutes. It would be based on exactly what horse racing is: A deep strategy game where riders, bettors, trainers, grooms, handicappers and cold hard bettors do not know the outcome before the gates spring, or unfold, with the TV viewer along for the ride. It would do what racing has long wanted: To teach people the sport while presenting it in a fun way. 

As an aside, the package would probably help dispel a few PETA myths while it’s at it, by showing the human side of racing, and their interactions with the equine athletes. 

In the end, changing the way racing is presented on television can allow it to share what it has always wanted to share to a willing and wanting sports audience: The public gets to feel like we feel. That is something–in 60 years of live TV production of the sport–racing has never been able to let them experience.

Dean Towers is a horse owner, racing fan, and board member of the Horseplayers Association of North America. Dean has presented at various racing conferences across the continent, and resides in Toronto, ONT, where he is a Vice President of a Search Engine Marketing firm.