For NYRA and FOX Sports, Horse Racing Isn’t Just Horseplay

The broadcaster and racing association are rejuvenating the sport on TV

Like boxing and other sports whose heyday was in the mid 20th century, horse racing lost much of its luster in the early part of this century, thanks to the growth of digital entertainment, broader concern for animal welfare, and the NFL’s dominance of broadcast sports, accompanied by deteriorating attendance and waning media coverage.

It has been a surprise, then, to see the sport’s significant resurgence in recent years. In 2022, for example, FOX Sports and the New York Racing Association (NYRA) jointly announced a deal in which the broadcaster acquired exclusive media rights for the Belmont Stakes, the final jewel of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown series. In 2024, the 150th Kentucky Derby set a new record for viewership — 16.7 million viewers, a 13% increase from 2023 — and drew 156,710, its largest in-person crowd since 2018. The two-day 2024 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar in Southern California reported an attendance of 67,418, a significant increase from the last time the event was held there in 2021.

New interest has also juiced investment in the venues. Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, has invested $300 million in renovations. New York’s Belmont Park has a $500 million reconstruction underway while the 2024 and 2025 Belmont Stakes are temporarily run at the upstate Saratoga Race Course; the newly renovated track in Queens, NY, will host the 2027 Breeders’ Cup. Maryland’s legislature approved $400 million to overhaul Pimlico, home of the Preakness Stakes.

Year-Round Coverage

The deal between FOX Sports and NYRA cemented a relationship begun in 2016 with Saratoga Live, which broadcast live every race day of the Saratoga summer meet across FS1, FS2, and FOX, followed the next year by Belmont Park Live and Saratoga Live, and, in 2019, America’s Day at the Races. The broadcaster now has year-round coverage of all NYRA tracks and other tracks nationally. The current eight-year pact, which launched in 2023, encompasses the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival, the multi-day event preceding the Belmont Stakes and comprising dozens of other top thoroughbred races.

NYRA produces most of the race broadcasts onsite. (Photo: NYRA)

In June, FOX Sports announced the return of FOX Saratoga Saturday: the national showcase of the annual summer meet at historic Saratoga Race Course aired Saturdays this summer on FOX broadcast network and generated 17.5 hours of programming. The announcement followed news from NYRA that the Belmont Stakes — a seven-hour broadcast — will return to Saratoga for a third consecutive year in 2026.

Viewers have noticed: FOX Sports’ Saturday broadcasts of Saratoga races have averaged 501,000 viewers, more than the 281,000 tuning into the NHL’s regular season on TNT or the 358,000 watching college basketball’s season on FOX/FS1.

The Expanding FOX–NYRA Partnership

“FOX has been a great partner on the technical side as well as the broadcast-production side,” says Eric Donovan, senior director, TV broadcast operations, NYRA. He credits FOX Sports VP, Field Operations, Brad Cheney as “instrumental” in guiding NYRA’s broadcast-systems development over the past nine years.

Except for the Belmont Stakes, which FOX produces, all racing broadcasts are handled directly by NYRA’s teams. They operate from six All Mobile Video mobile units, including the most recent addition: a battery backup that can run the entire production for 15 minutes in the event of a power loss. Based in Saratoga, NY, the trucks travel to other tracks, such as Aqueduct and Belmont, as needed.

FOX Sports’ own trucks are deployed for the coverage the broadcaster produces.

The infrastructure is a work in progress. The NYRA team is transitioning from an EVS-centric production workflow to an Evertz DreamCatcher environment, which will include Studer Vista audio consoles. CP Communications provides many of NYRA’s rentals, comms, and wireless systems.

FOX’s shows are produced onsite, from FOX trucks. NYRA will also bring in remote feeds from other tracks, including Oaklawn Park in Arkansas. The racing association has a production asset in Tony Allevato, a veteran television producer who came aboard in 2016 and helped start horse-racing network TVG in 1999. Rebranded FanDuel TV, the network has one of the largest shares in the online-betting market, the New York Times reports. (Allevato is also president of NYRA Bets, the association’s online-wagering platform, in which FOX Sports took a 25% equity stake in 2021 as part of the expanding NYRA partnership.)

“Depending on how big the broadcast or the race day is,” says Donovan, “it could be anything from a live-view backpack and a camera to an entire flypack from which we deploy more cameras, for the Arkansas Derby. “We use LTN and [pari-mutuel network service provider] Roberts Communications for some of those remote shows and for transmission. We can scale up or down as needed.”

Cams and Drones

NYRA deploys more than three dozen cameras at Saratoga, where the goal has been to give viewers deeper engagement with the entire race environment.

“We have around 40 cameras throughout the track that cover all the action, all the angles,” Donovan says. “We’ve purchased a point-to-point cable-cam system. It’s not the full Spidercam that you’ll see at that NFL game: it’s specifically for covering horses racing down the back stretch, to give viewers a little bit more of a closeup angle. And we’re deploying a drone cam, which has been groundbreaking for horse racing. It gives some angles you can’t get from a handheld camera on the ground. In terms of being able to follow horses around a turn and see what’s going on there, it makes a big difference. Flying overhead and behind them a little bit, [viewers] can really see the race develop.”

So can the race’s judges, known as stewards, who work with the New York State Gaming Commission. Stewards are located at the track to adjudicate any race disputes and previously relied on views from the hard cameras positioned around the track.

“When horses are running straight at you,” Donovan explains, “you can kind of tell, okay, they’re keeping a straight line or they’re not. But, when they’re running around a turn, that perception changes. Having that drone overhead following the course of the race makes it a lot easier for everyone — fans, viewers, judges — to see everything clearly.”

Drones are a recent addition to horse racing’s broadcast armory, and they need to be flown extra cautiously around animals that can regard an inadvertently moved audio cable as another kind of snake.

“Thoroughbreds can be unpredictable, especially young ones,” says Donovan. “They’re not experienced around some of this equipment, so safety is our top priority, to ensure we provide a safe environment for the horses and the jockeys and all the employees on the track. But [we still want to] be able to get the kind of shots that we’re looking for to bring the viewer to the next level.”

The Audio Component

Racetracks present particular challenges for sound. Because it’s impossible to completely cover the entire 1.5-mile-long tracks for every possible audio element, wireless mics are placed at critical junctures, such as turns. Potential RF interference from topographical elements, such as foliage, also has to be taken into account for positioning. It’s helping the sport’s resurgence that more jockeys are willing to wear wireless microphones.

Wireless mics placed at turns help cover the 1.5-mile-long tracks. (Photo: Chris Rahayel)

“It’s not something we do all the time,” notes Donovan, “but, for selected bigger races, we like to do it. It plays really well on playback: when you’re showing a replay and you have the jockey miked up and you can hear him start to encourage his horse and maybe talk to the horse, maybe talk to other riders — ‘Hey, I’m coming through, look down inside!’ — it definitely elevates the broadcast to the next level.”

The sonic elements are mixed atop a bed of ambient crowd and paddock sounds, with announcers on-air and over the PA adding to the atmosphere. There is also some occasional sweetening, as Hollywood calls sound effects. That’s a necessity given the audio-coverage challenges, and, says Donovan, it ensures a consistent sound experience throughout the race.

Horse racing has always had a close association with legal gambling, so the advent of widespread wagering in 2018 has helped contribute to the sport’s renaissance, as reflected in FOX Sports’ broadcasting more than 900 hours of New York horse racing nationally across its channels.

The path is clear for even more horseplay on television, Donovan says. “We’re always looking to do more. We’re always looking to innovate. We’ve seen an increase of broadcast time on FOX broadcast, which is huge. We are always looking to do more there and present high-quality racing. To get these races out to a national broadcast audience, I think, is huge for horse racing, to be able to get people to watch and stay all year round and not just during the Triple Crown.”