Jamie Aitchison, the sports editor of Channel 4, has defended the UK commercial broadcaster’s audience figures for horseracing coverage.
“Channel 4 racing, year on year, without the crown jewel events, is still seven percent down on 2012, but I think there are quite obvious reasons for that,” he told the Guardian newspaper. “Against 2010 and 2011, they’re up. All that moaning… is nonsense because we've got more people watching than in 2010 and 2011.”
Asked to elaborate on the reasons for better audiences in 2012, he added: “I think sport was massive in people's minds last year. You had great racing stories. We had a number of weekends where racing was on the front pages: Frankel and then Black Caviar coming over. The Diamond Jubilee gave a great boost to the Derby and Royal Ascot because the Queen was massively in focus. I can show you a chart; 2012 is an anomaly in terms of racing. Racing was actually in decline for years previous to it and then spiked in 2012.”
Aitchison added that there are no “major concerns” and he added that 21.7m people had watched at least three minutes of horseracing on the channel this year.
Channel 4 became the exclusive terrestrial broadcaster of British horseracing in January after outbidding UK public-service broadcaster the BBC for a major package of rights including the Grand National, the Derby and Royal Ascot.