Racing Victoria plans to capitalise on silver lining from COVID

The figures were released at Racing Victoria’s annual general meeting on Tuesday.

With Racing Victoria also eyeing an opportunity to streamline its media assets, having entered into a new agreement with Seven in August to take greater control of Racing.com, chief executive Giles Thompson said COVID-19 has created an opportunity for the industry to fast-track its integrated media business.

“No doubt [increased engagement] is a silver lining of [COVID] and what it’s enabled us to do is reconnect with people who haven’t connected with racing and wagering on racing in a while and have rediscovered a love for it,” Thompson said.

“As far as how we tackle that, and this plays to the integrated media business, we’re quite fortunate in Victoria that we control a large part of our media world.

“If we talk about things like on-demand type products and the type of content we can deliver to our punters and viewers as well, we have a great opportunity in that space, and for me, that’s the next few years, to bring together an integrated media business and really try and drive engagement in our sport, which has lots of direct and indirect benefits for us, is a real opportunity for us and it’s accelerated because of COVID.”

But while managing Victoria’s racing calendar “with optimal efficiency” is also one of RV’s key goals, Thompson said he didn’t believe the “clear air” in November necessarily presented an opportunity for Victoria to extend its carnival.

The Melbourne Racing Club earlier this year proposed to move its Caulfield Cup carnival to after Melbourne Cup week in an attempt to increase its reach and interest by gaining clearer air from the end of the AFL season.

“The debate we had about that as an industry around April-May time this year that we should try and find some clear air, a lot of that discussion was to get away from the footy codes,” Thompson said.

“I think we leveraged pretty well those footy codes and the results this spring suggest that we managed to find plenty of clear air and momentum on that.

“The debate now changes to … is there clear air in the back end of November where we can find some extra oxygen for Victorian racing? For me it’s not as clear cut as that.

“It’s not clear to me that people at the end of this month are really ready to engage in racing versus a month ago when Christmas is around the corner and school holidays are a week away.

“It’s not a closed door that we shouldn’t consider how to continue to tweak and innovate our spring carnival because it’s never going to be 100 per cent right. There’ll definitely be those discussions, we’ll review the whole spring and the programming is part of that review too.”

Also at the AGM, Racing Victoria announced it would be retiring Trakus as its sectional data supplier and replace it with Triple S Data, which will be rolled out across the city tracks in coming months.

Meanwhile, Kruger said a decision on potential Aquanita disqualifications was imminent.

He said stewards were still considering responses to show cause notices sent to the owners of Aquanita runners, which asked them to explain why their horses should not be disqualified for races in which it’s been determined they were illegally administered performance-enhancing drugs.