Furlongs, handicaps, claiming races and group races. Horse racing can be a confusing world containing a myriad of alien and industry-specific terminology for operators and bettors alike.

Now, Arena Racing Company (ARC) is aiming to look beyond the “analogue” nature of racing through its strategic alliance with Tabcorp, Racecourse Media Group (RMG) and 1/ST CONTENT.

“The Racing One Rights Alliance is bringing the best of British, American and Australasian racing together which will then go and pioneer new territories,” explained Brendan Parnell, Managing Director of Media and International at ARC – speaking to Insider Sport’s Editor, Ted Orme-Claye.

“Instead of racing being complicated, and a bit analogue in the terminology we use, it gives us a chance to offer customers in those markets a much easier to integrate package of racing which is 24/7.

“Whether you’re imperial or metric, you’re into furlongs, yards or metres, handicaps, weight for age [or] claiming races, we do have a sport that does need to be explained for customers. So I think that’s why we’ve got to find a solution to make it easier for the bookmakers and their customers to accommodate it and explain it for them.”

Parnell added that it makes “eminent sense” for international cooperation between horse racing governing bodies to align how the sport is presented in order to “make it more seamless to integrate the bookmakers”.

Racing and betting are ‘intrinsically linked’

Until recently, horse racing was the most wagered on sport in the UK and Parnell explained that the goal of the ARC is “getting racing as a betting product right”.

Areas of focus include field sizes and the introduction of competitions such as the team-based Racing League and the All-Weather Championships – which culminate in a Finals Day on Good Friday each year which features £1m in prize money.

Parnell added: “There’s a range of things that we’re working on. The predominant revenue source for us is still UK betting but we’re now on turnover deals with bookmakers and that gives us access to data we’ve never had before.

“We can share with bookmakers market share performance on things like self-service and overall retail and we can demonstrate where some bookmakers might be underperforming compared to others and help them find ways to present racing in a better way.

“Another example is we’re using artificial intelligence tools to drive revenue growth and we’re doing that to reorder races within a fixture. The early trials have demonstrated a positive uplift for bookmakers so we’re looking to roll out that race reordering more broadly to our fixtures.”

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