Horse racing hopes to have a new free-to-air broadcasting deal in place by this time next year, with the BBC to be encouraged to bid to bring the sport back to its screens.
While the Jockey Club chief executive, Simon Bazalgette, praised the impact of Channel 4’s coverage since it sealed an exclusive £15m deal to exclusively show all the major meetings, he said the door was open for the BBC to return.
“Channel 4 have been a good partner, they’ve really promoted racing. Equally, I think racing is probably a more attractive sport than it was four years ago so I think there will be competition for it,” he said.
“I think there will be other people who will be interested. Channel 4 are in situ and they have done a great job,” he said. “If the BBC were only coming in for the crown jewels they’d have to convince us that was better for the sport than doing it week in, week out. But that’s possible, they may be able to do that.”
The current three-year deal runs to the end of next year, but Bazalgette said he hoped to have a new one in place by next year’s Cheltenham Festival.
Channel 4 had previously argued that it could not afford to air any racing without subsidy but following a change in the law to permit bookmakers to advertise on television it shifted strategy.
The ratings for the Grand National, which peaked last year at 8.9m, compared well with recent audiences on the BBC but there have been questions over Channel 4’s coverage more generally.
Bazalgette, who was enthusiastic about the Channel 4 deal when it was signed, paid tribute to the broadcaster’s coverage and insisted that concentrating the entire output on one free-to-air channel had been a success.
“It’s worked out really well. If you consider what the other options might have been – probably sticking with the split deal between the BBC and Channel 4 – we’d have been in a much worse position,” he said.
