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ITV Racing’s future in balance with negotiations back on at Cheltenham | Sport


An extension to ITV Racing’s contract for terrestrial coverage of the sport beyond the end of 2020 was still in the balance on Tuesday evening, after a day which brought two of the main protagonists to the same box at Cheltenham for lunch but could not resolve a negotiation that has now been ongoing for well over a year.

The day started with the two sides seemingly further apart than ever, following a report in the Daily Mail that the process had stalled over an insistence on ITV’s part that it would not guarantee coverage on its main channel for any of racing’s “crown jewel” events including the Derby and Royal Ascot, which are often staged at the same time as major international football tournaments for which ITV also has broadcasting rights.

Both ITV and Racecourse Media Group (RMG), which negotiates the sale of racecourses’ media rights, later issued brief statements to suggest that negotiations on an extension to ITV’s four-year contract were continuing.

“Discussions continue, and we’re pushing towards a win-win for both parties,” a spokesperson for ITV said, while a counterpart at RMG said that “commercial discussions are at an advanced stage and we are very hopeful of a positive outcome in the near future.” Several of the major players in the extended saga of the contract renewal are believed to have shared a box at Cheltenham on Tuesday, including Delia Bushell, a former executive with BT Sport and Sky who succeeded Simon Bazalgette as the Jockey Club’s chief executive last year, and Niall Sloane, ITV’s director of sport.

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Whether any breakthrough was achieved over lunch remains to be seen, however, and ITV Racing’s team will seemingly continue its coverage of the 2020 Cheltenham Festival on Wednesday amid uncertainty over whether this year’s meeting will be their last.

The source of Tuesday’s story in the Mail was unclear, but it raises as many, if not more, questions than it answers, as it difficult to see how ITV could ever be expected to guarantee main-channel coverage for racing in all circumstances if, for instance, it also had an option on an England football match which could bring in a guaranteed audience of 10m+. No sport other than football could realistically expect to demand such a clause with any hope of success.

In any case, there is no incentive for ITV to take big events like the Derby and Royal Ascot off its main channel in anything but truly exceptional circumstances. In the past, clashes with football coverage – for instance, during Royal Ascot in 2018 – have been handled with as much of the racing as possible being shown on ITV1 before a switch to ITV4.



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