At The Races
At The Races was a British horse racing television channel that broadcast live racing from the United Kingdom and Ireland, together with racing news, previews, reviews and betting-related programming. It was launched on 1 May 2002 as Attheraces, a partnership involving British Sky Broadcasting, Arena Leisure and Channel Four Television Corporation. The channel closed on 29 March 2004 because of financial problems, but after restructuring it was relaunched on 11 June 2004 without Channel Four. It then broadcast continuously until 1 January 2019, when it was relaunched within the Sky Sports portfolio as Sky Sports Racing. The At The Races name survived the change: it remained the name of the channel's parent company, and its website and app continued as the channel's digital partners.
Launch in 2002
Attheraces began broadcasting on 1 May 2002. The venture brought together three partners with different interests in racing. BSkyB provided the satellite platform and pay-television expertise, Arena Leisure operated racecourses, and Channel Four Television Corporation was at that time the established terrestrial broadcaster of British racing. The connection was visible on screen, with Channel 4's racing coverage associated with the Attheraces name during this period. The channel's proposition was a dedicated home for the sport: live race meetings, rather than the highlights and selected coverage that general sports channels could offer, supported by interactive services that allowed viewers to engage with racing and betting through their televisions.
The idea arrived at a moment when British racing coverage was fragmenting. The Racing Channel, on air since 1995, closed in January 2003, leaving Attheraces as a central part of the televised racing landscape during its first incarnation.
The rights dispute and closure in 2004
The channel's first incarnation foundered on the cost and structure of its rights deals. Attheraces had acquired its rights collectively from a large group of racecourses, and the Office of Fair Trading examined that arrangement. The OFT concluded that by selling their rights together, the 49 racecourses had restricted competition between them when supplying Attheraces, with the result that the channel had to pay more for the rights than would have been the case if there had been effective competition. Collective selling could in principle be permitted where it was essential to achieve economic benefits of which consumers received a fair share, but the OFT found those conditions were not met in this case.
Attheraces terminated the media rights agreement in question with effect from midnight on 29 March 2004, and the channel stopped broadcasting on that date due to financial problems. Although the attheraces website continued, the interactive television channel was ended, in part because of competition from increasingly popular betting exchanges. The collapse also led to litigation: Arena pursued High Court proceedings against the Racecourse Association and 30 UK racecourses to recover £51.3 million which it claimed it was owed. For viewers, the immediate effect was simpler: a channel that had promised wall-to-wall live racing disappeared from screens less than two years after launch.
Relaunch in June 2004
The closure proved temporary. Arena bought out Channel 4's 33 per cent stake in the channel, and the operation was restructured as a joint venture between BSkyB and Arena, with arrangements also made for racecourses to become equity holders in the new business. An agreement was completed with SIS to act as broadcast production partner, and the channel relaunched on Sky Digital on 11 June 2004 as a stand-alone venture.
Announcing the relaunch, chief executive Matthew Imi said that quality live UK racing would return on a channel dedicated to the sport, available at no extra cost in over 9 million homes. The relaunch offered live coverage of race meetings including Chepstow and Southwell, and promised viewers interactive betting via their televisions in a new format designed to be quicker and easier to use. Production was based at the SIS broadcast facility in Milton Keynes, where the channel remained until the end of 2018.
Growth after the relaunch
The relaunched channel quickly established itself. Marking the first anniversary of the relaunch in June 2005, At The Races reported record audience levels and said the business model had allowed it to deliver £2 million back to its racecourse shareholders and partners, without requesting funding from them. By that point it had the backing of 28 leading British racecourses and all 27 Irish racecourses, and it described itself as the UK and Ireland's leading horse racing and betting channel.
Distribution was wide. In the UK and Ireland the channel was carried by Sky, NTL, Telewest Broadband, NTL Ireland and Chorus in their most widely distributed packages, making it available to around 10 million multichannel subscribers, and it had also secured broadcasting deals outside the UK. Its chief executive spoke of a rights-based business spanning television, internet, broadband and mobile, spearheading technology-driven revenue streams for the racing industry. A rival, Racing UK, had launched on 29 May 2004, just before the At The Races relaunch, and the two channels divided British racecourse coverage between them for the following decade and a half.
Programming
At The Races built its day around live racing. The channel started broadcasting at 9am each day. In the mornings, Racing News was shown on the hour, followed by reviews of the previous day's racing, a format repeated several times and updated with interviews. Presenters changed over in the early afternoon, when the lead presenter was joined by a guest to discuss the afternoon's racing, before live coverage of the day's meetings took over. Programmes associated with the channel included Racing Review, The Racing Debate, Get In and Raceday Live, alongside overseas coverage strands that later continued under Sky Sports Racing, such as Stateside coverage of American racing and Australian racing.
The tone mixed the needs of racing followers and punters: form, going, market moves and results sat alongside interviews and debate. That blend reflected the channel's business model, which depended on serving viewers whose interest in racing was bound up with betting, as well as racecourses that wanted their fixtures shown to the widest possible audience.
Position on Sky and Virgin Media
For most viewers, At The Races was identified with its electronic programme guide positions: channel 415 on Sky and channel 534 on Virgin Media. It operated autonomously from the other Sky Sports channels, despite Sky's role as a joint-venture partner, and it was not part of the main Sky Sports subscription bundle. Its owners were Sky and Arena Racing Company, the successor business to Arena Leisure's racing interests. That independence gave the channel a distinct identity within British sports television: it was a racing service owned partly by a broadcaster and partly by the sport itself, through racecourse interests.
The move to Sky Sports Racing
On 30 April 2018 it was announced that At The Races would be relaunched as part of the larger Sky Sports portfolio as Sky Sports Racing, to be distributed widely via Sky Sports packages and platforms including Sky Go, and made available in high definition. Sky Sports managing director Barney Francis said horse racing was a massive sport with which Sky had been involved for two decades, and that the dedicated channel would give customers more of what they loved every day. Sky Sports Racing was to offer live racing from over 650 UK fixtures, as well as selected exclusive international race meetings, and to be available to every Sky TV customer in the UK and Ireland at no extra cost.
New rights followed. Within the same month, Chester Race Company signed a ten-year deal to bring live racing from Chester, home of the Boodles May Festival, and Bangor-on-Dee to Sky Sports Racing from March 2019. In July 2018 it was announced that the channel would also hold rights to Ascot from March 2019. Matthew Imi, still chief executive of At The Races, described the move of production to Sky's studios in West London as the ideal home for the new channel and called Sky Sports Racing a potential game changer for racing.
Relaunch as Sky Sports Racing in 2019
The rebranding took place on 1 January 2019. Production moved from the SIS facility in Milton Keynes to the newly automated Studio G at the Sky Campus in Isleworth, and the channel took its place alongside Sky's other dedicated sports channels, following the 2017 introduction of Sky Sports Premier League, Sky Sports Football, Sky Sports F1, Sky Sports Golf and Sky Sports Cricket. The At The Races brand did not disappear: it remained as the channel's parent company, while the At The Races website and app became the channel's digital partners, continuing to offer racecards, form and full race replays.
Legacy
At The Races had an unusually turbulent life for a sports channel: launched with three major partners, dead within two years amid a competition-law dispute over its rights, then revived within weeks under new ownership and sustained for a further fourteen and a half years. Its history illustrates the economics of televised British racing, in which the value of live pictures, the interests of racecourses and the money attached to betting are tightly connected. As Sky Sports Racing, its successor continues the same basic service — daily live racing, morning news and reviews — from within the Sky Sports family, while the At The Races name endures online as one of the sport's best-known digital brands.
