Thumping hearts, sweaty palms and a gut-churning amount of money on the line: the executives who signed off ITV’s £30m investment in racing will know just how the racegoers feel as the Cheltenham Festival opens on Tuesday. Having bubbled under on ITV4 for most of the two and a bit months since it took over the terrestrial contract from Channel 4, this is where ITV’s move back into racing starts to get serious. By Friday evening it may be apparent whether it was a shrewd investment or just another mug punt.
When the all-important numbers are plugged into spreadsheets in a few days’ time, several of the most important figures will remain a closely guarded secret. Only those directly concerned know how much precisely the big betting firms are shelling out for 30-second ads or what they have been promised in terms of ITV’s anticipated audience figures to persuade them to do so.
But what is known is that the value of the rights increased by 50% when ITV snatched the monopoly on terrestrial racing coverage from Channel 4, which paid around £20m for its final four-year contract. It did so to get its hands on the biggest events – Cheltenham, the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot – and the revenue from these alone will ultimately determine whether the gamble will be landed or lost.
The pressure is on and Ed Chamberlin, who left Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football to anchor the ITV Racing coverage, conceded on Monday he is feeling it as much as anyone.
“Very much so,” Chamberlin said. “It’s a mixture with huge excitement but I’m also massively nervous. It does feel like a huge responsibility presenting the Cheltenham Festival for the first time on ITV and everything that goes with it. I’m normally quite a calm person, as well.
“We’ve been building up to it for months. When I was first offered the job, I have to admit that the Cheltenham Festival was the first thing that sprang to mind along with the Grand National and Royal Ascot. I’m a meticulous preparer and I don’t think I could have done too much more, so like everyone, I’m eager to get going now.”
Chamberlin has anchored coverage from Cheltenham twice this year and on both occasions faced situations where planning was overtaken by events. ITV’s first afternoon, on New Year’s Day, unfolded in torrential rain, while Trials day at the end of January saw the shocking, fatal collapse of Oliver Sherwood’s Many Clouds, the 2015 Grand National winner, seconds after his brave defeat of Thistlecrack in the Cotswold Chase.
“You know things like that can happen in racing but it was just horrible,” Chamberlin says. “Obviously, working in football I’d never experienced anything like that before in my life.
“I was very lucky that people said some very nice things and all I had to do at the end of the day was get the tone right. Oliver Sherwood’s words were extraordinary in the circumstances, and fair play to him for doing that. Racing needed him to do that.
“The biggest difference [between football and racing] is that in football you have ages to plan your words. Unless someone scored right at the end, you could plan what you were going to say at half-time, at the breaks, at full-time.
“In racing, if it’s a thriller, which I think the Champion Hurdle on Tuesday might be as I can genuinely see six or eight horses jumping the last almost in line, then how the hell do you decipher the story from that as they pass the line? That’s the challenge, because your words as they pass the line have to be spot on. It’s very different but I’m learning fast, I think.”
ITV is, understandably, throwing itself into its first Festival and its Opening Show magazine programme at 9.30am each day will run for 90 minutes on ITV4. Considerable thought has also been put into features for the extended gaps between races, another issue that does not arise in football.
“Features are hopefully something that we do really well, and involving Gabriel Clarke in the coverage was something I was passionate about from the start,” Chamberlin said. “I think he’s one of the best sports reporters around, and he’s done a feature tomorrow on JT McNamara [who died in July 2016, just over three years after he was paralysed in a fall at Cheltenham in March 2013]. I’ve just seen clips of that for the first time and it’s pretty special, very emotive, and I imagine it will be very emotional for Mick [Fitzgerald] and AP [McCoy], who’ll be with me tomorrow and were both close to him.”
The senior executives will certainly have a target in mind for the audience figures this week but have also been in the game long enough to keep it to themselves.
In Channel 4’s final year, however, even the average audience for Gold Cup day was not enough to lift the coverage into the station’s top 30 shows of the week (the last of which, an ancient episode of The Simpsons, attracted an average of 0.89m). The average figure across the four days was 662,000 viewers, a 9.8% audience share. If ITV does not exceed that at a canter, expect heads to be rolling on the South Bank on Saturday morning.
