NEWS
Breeders' Cup TV as metaphor
Posted: Saturday, October 28, 2000
As NBC takes over racing's major events, questions arise over how television can serve the sport
Racing enters a new era on November 4 when NBC-TV broadcasts the $13-million Breeders' Cup championship day from Churchill Downs. Beginning with that 4 1/2-hour broadcast, NBC will own the rights to Thoroughbred racing's best-known events-the Breeders' Cup and the Triple Crown.
NBC has broadcast the Breeders' Cup since the first championship day at Hollywood Park in 1984, and a year ago it purchased the rights to televise the Triple Crown through 2005 for a reported $51.5-million. ABC-TV had held telecast rights to the Triple Crown from 1986 through this year's series.
As one NBC official noted, the Triple Crown deal "really makes us the complete entity when it comes to the sport of Thoroughbred racing." For its part, NBC brings a commitment to sports-it owns the rights to the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship playoffs, the Olympics (although that venture was a ratings fiasco this year), and Wimbledon and the French Open tennis championships, to name several of its properties.
The network owned by General Electric Co. also offers a widely acclaimed ability to cross-promote those properties to achieve high ratings and maximum fan interest, choice viewer demographics for advertisers, and attractive sponsor packages to entice juicy corporate sponsorships.
For instance, the Triple Crown races this year will be shown before, between, or after major NBC telecasts such as NBA playoff games and the French Open, so the opportunities for attracting a new audience to the sport are significant.
NBC's prominence on the national scene will grow larger in 2001 with the anticipated demise of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA) series for older horses on the Fox network. Fox has signed a new contract with Major League Baseball, and that commitment is expected to limit its racing broadcasts, as will Fox's new, eight-year deal with NASCAR.
Broadest audience
Racing again will be carried extensively on the ESPN and ESPN2 sports networks, both of which are owned by ABC, and racing has new television outlets such as the Television Games Network (TVG) and The Racing Network, which are tilted heavily toward the sport's gambling aspects. In addition, individual tracks have their own shows or cooperate with cable affiliates to produce racing programming.
All televised media make their contributions to promoting the sport, but cable networks and broadcasts lack the expansive reach of the broadcast networks even in an era of fragmented viewership. For the last 25 years, racing has yearned for a bigger network presence, and now its major-race air time mostly will be on NBC.
Thus, how the network performs in its racing shows and how it covers the sport will have a profound effect on the Thoroughbred industry through the middle of the decade. A lot is riding on the partnership of NBC and racing, and some members of the industry view television as a make-or-break medium for the sport.
"This is Custer's last stand for racing, and TV is a crucial part of it," said Nick Zito, 52, who has trained the winners of three Triple Crown races and one Breeders' Cup race. "The reason for racing's rebirth lately is not the economy or people with money who are fueling racing. It is promotion and marketing that have helped the sport to come back to where it is now. The most important thing is for TV to try to capture the glamour that took place when we were kids."
Many people within the sport and the television industry have strong ideas on what television should do or should not do to promote racing, and their ideas now will be focused on NBC, which certainly has ideas of its own on how to structure its shows.
Television and racing have had a stormy history, in part because the sport pushed away television in the 1950s (thinking it was harmful to live attendance) and paid the price with nearly a half-century of decline. Some of the decline was due to a paucity of television coverage, and also to blame were the sport's penchant for internecine wrangling and inattention to its fans.
"We're a generation or two behind," said Terry Meyocks, New York Racing Association president. "The more we can maximize our exposure, the better we'll do for racing."
Unique relationship
Television is unique among media because it owns a stake in an event or sport. Newspapers, magazines, and radio generally cover sports as news events; these media rise and fall on the overall quality of their products. Television networks in many ways stage the events that they cover. The TV entity and the sport will rise or fall together.
If the direction is upward, then other benefits accrue to both sport and broadcaster. The sport attracts sponsorships, and better ratings-the be-all and end-all of television-translate into higher advertising rates for the broadcaster.
NBC officials expect the synergy to translate into bigger numbers; network officials say that a one-point increase-approximately a million homes-is possible.
This year, the Kentucky Derby (G1) had a 6.6 overnight rating, about even with 1999, while the Preakness Stakes (G1) had a 4.6 rating (up from the prior year due to Derby winner Fusaichi Pegasus), and the Belmont Stakes (G1) had a 3.4 overnight rating (down sharply because the field contained neither the Derby winner nor Preakness winner Red Bullet).
"I think an increase of one rating point would be huge, and I don't think it is that far-fetched. It could definitely happen," said Jon Miller, senior vice president of NBC Sports. "I think it's our job to drive that number; that's a big thing in what we can deliver.
"The lack of competition with the NBA, and the fact that we can use the NBA as an asset instead of an antagonist, if you will, will make a big difference. More people will know and learn about the Triple Crown and those races than have ever had a chance to do it before."
Certainly, racing's top officials are hoping that NBC drives interest in the sport.
"Dick Ebersol (NBC Sports chairman) is one of the most creative human beings I have ever met," said Tom Meeker, president of Churchill Downs Inc. and Triple Crown Productions, the company that markets the three races.
"NBC's distinguishing characteristic is that they have a belief in sports as a critical part of their image. This attracted me to them, right off. They continue to invest in it and understand how important sports are to their overall programming."
Competitive situation
Nor should anyone doubt that NBC will use its considerable expertise to drive the numbers. "I think we're all very competitive and take a tremendous amount of pride in our work. This is a very small business; everybody watches everybody else's product," Miller said.
"You're judged not only by the consumer and the advertiser and the industry, you're judged by your peers. You always strive to put on the best product that you can. There are going to be a lot of people watching our Triple Crown coverage next year and comparing it to what ABC Sports did, and it's going to be a very competitive situation."
The NTRA has utilized advertising and televised races to expand interest in the sport over the past 20 months, and its officials are hopeful that NBC's vast experience will benefit the sport.
"I think they (NBC) are among the very best at both pre-promoting and cross-promoting their properties," said NTRA Commissioner Tim Smith. "They have the potential-obviously, even more so if they end up retaining the Breeders' Cup rights beyond 2001 (see sidebar)-of being tremendously important, both in a narrow sense and a broad sense.
"In the narrow sense, I think the conventional wisdom-and I talked to someone from another network today-is that, all other things being equal, the Triple Crown ratings should improve by not being against the NBA but by being on the NBA (network).
"And in a broader sense, NBC tends to get fairly deeply involved with their major properties. They tend to view us as an industry-the NTRA, Breeders' Cup, and Triple Crown on the one hand, and them on the other-as being promotional marketing partners.
"They'd like to see Thoroughbred racing develop more major sponsors, for example. That clearly would help us, and they can also make our sponsor packages more compelling. It also helps them because it gives them more ready-made buyers for their advertising."
Visa USA will remain the Triple Crown's principal sponsor and will again offer its $5-million bonus to the owner of any horse that sweeps the series. ABC was responsible for signing up Visa.
Explaining the sport
Smith said NBC also will reach the general sports fan with the message that there is more to racing than the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown. "We really think that one of the objectives of television ought to be to explain the sport," Smith said.
For its part, NBC will utilize a strategy that has generally worked for it in the past. "We're big on storytelling here," Miller said. "That flows across every major property that we do, whether it's the Olympics, Breeders' Cup, the U.S. Open Golf Championship-everything."
In large part, the storytelling approach has been very successful-right up to the Olympics, which told stories that were up to 20 hours old. That will not be a problem with the Breeders' Cup or the Triple Crown, which are live events. NBC negotiated to move the post times for the three races back a half-hour to 6:04 p.m. to draw a larger audience and to abut its NBA or tennis coverage.
NBC will look at the sport's stars, of course, but also will search for the interesting story behind the headlines. "I think that there are a lot of great stories that go into racing. Obviously, the horses themselves, the jockeys, trainers, breeders, the families-and you have to explain to your audience why this story, or that horse, or jockey, or trainer is important," Miller said.
Reason for rooting
"You have to give them a reason to follow or root or be interested," Miller continued. "If we can't make people interested in what we're doing, (then) there's no reason for them to come and stay with us. And I think our audience has come to rely on that.
"We will have an entire team dedicated to researching and going in and finding these stories-and developing them so that you do know some of the owners, for example, who are new to the sport. Let's face it, everybody's going to cover and know about the Bob Bafferts and the (Robert and Beverly) Lewises anyway. It'll be on ESPN, CNN, on every news and sports information station. The trick is to find those stories that people don't know-and make them interesting."
A fan of NBC's storytelling is D. G. Van Clief Jr., who has been at the helm of the Breeders' Cup since before the first championship event. "Back in 1984, there was doubt about how we were going to fill four hours of air time for the first Breeders' Cup," Van Clief said. "But with NBC, we quickly realized that the challenge was how to fit into four hours all the stories that they wanted to do."
The show has since been expanded by a half-hour, partly to accommodate the new $1-million Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Turf (G1).
Like other media, television has the ability to tell stories of a sport's rich history as well as its hottest newcomers. NBC's story choices certainly will not fulfill the expectations of everyone in the sport, in large part because racing has so many constituencies and so many opinions.
Some want stories about the rising jockeys or trainers, and they criticize television's tendency to focus on the current stars such as leading trainers Bob Baffert and D. Wayne Lukas. Jenine Sahadi, who won the 1996 and '97 Breeders' Cup Sprint (G1) with Lit de Justice and Elmhurst, respectively, believes more attention should be given to the stable area.
"I don't know if anybody, any of the networks, does a very good job," Sahadi said. "TV is so focused on each individual race instead of showing what the grooms do, the backside-what it's like, the exercise riders, the hotwalkers."
Of course, reality can bite, and focusing on the backstretch might require also taking a look at stable-area problems such as substandard living conditions and substance abuse. (Churchill Downs, this year's host track, has built new housing and has a nationally acclaimed addictions program [see page 105].)
Sahadi, who worked in Hollywood Park's marketing department before taking out her trainer's license, said she hoped the NBC coverage would break racing's tendency to preach to the converted. "There are no NTRA ads on soap operas, or Live with Regis and Kathy Lee. If you advertise there, you're hitting an audience that you don't normally get. So, I have mixed emotions about how we promote horse racing," she said.
A minimum of history
Taking a middle-of-the-road position is Robert Lewis, a prominent owner and a Breeders' Cup director. "My attitude is that we need a moderation in terms of history and background if racing is always going to be meaningful to the audience. I don't think that NBC should overplay their hand in that regard," Lewis said.
"I do think that there is a greater interest for the public if they can share in the present-day horses and trainers. Let's talk about the young trainers who have become stars like Tom Amoss and Ron Ellis, and have a blending with some of the leading trainers in the East such as Shug McGaughey and the West such as Ron McAnally."
Lou Raffetto, general manager of Suffolk Downs outside Boston, agreed that a mix of stories would be most beneficial. "I think that there's a necessary balance between the stars and the human-interest stories," Raffetto said. "You can have the best of both worlds. People do like stars, after all-the Bafferts and Lukases, for instance. Whether it's show biz or sports, people like celebrities."
Tom Durkin, voice of the Breeders' Cup since its start and most likely to call the Triple Crown races beginning next year, injected a note of media savvy and realism into the discussion. "The network's job is to give people pretty much what they want. If Lukas and Baffert are the story, then you've got to get it out," Durkin said.
Racing's most visible human athletes, the jockeys, are ready to help NBC tell their many stories during the upcoming Breeders' Cup and 2001 Triple Crown. Pat Day, president of the Jockeys' Guild, said his comrades always have been highly marketable, but in the past they often were not part of the sport's marketing.
"We've always promoted the sport-long before we were recognized for doing it," Day said. "Whether it's interviews to help the game in print or on TV, or signing autographs for fans on the way from the jocks room to the paddock at Saratoga. TV has to put on good stories and a good show to get higher ratings, and we're willing to do our part."
Reg Lansberry, who began his career at CBS Inc. in New York, is an Atlanta-based contributing editor to Thoroughbred Times.
