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A Eulogy Of FanDuel TV

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

FanDuel TV (formerly known as TVG) has begun winding down operations. While the network will cover racing in some capacity through at least November, its studio shows are concluding, and much of the staff, both on-air and behind the camera, will no longer be employed by the company after this weekend.

This comes at a time when much of racing is contracting. I’d be remiss not to mention the upcoming closure of Aqueduct, which runs its last card on Sunday, and the uncertainty surrounding Hawthorne, which will come down to a decision-making process that figures to progress considerably next month.

Having said that, I’ve never been to either track, so I’m not the person to go to for tributes to them. I worked for TVG and the network formerly known as HRTV (rebranded to TVG2 in 2015) for 3 1/2 years. Moving west to take that job gave me a fresh start when I desperately needed one. I grew up quite a bit, and because of the move, I met the woman I eventually married. In some parallel universe somewhere, where the reason I left TVG in May of 2017 (also, for whatever it’s worth, the same reason a LOT of other talented, passionate people left TVG) doesn’t exist or is neutralized, I’m still there, still doing work I’m proud of, and almost certainly staring down the barrel of unemployment at the end of this month.

Of the recent racing-related business casualties, this is the one I can speak at length about.

– – – – –

First, and most importantly: There were people in horse racing who celebrated when FanDuel TV’s announcement came out earlier this year. Before we go any further, let me use this space to tell those people to take long walks off of short piers. Maybe you didn’t care for some aspects of FanDuel TV, TVG, or HRTV (and that’s your right; it comes with the territory), but I can say, with first-hand knowledge, that the networks employed more passionate horse racing people than any other outlet in the business. Those people have families, and they’re now looking for jobs. If you take joy in that, like the person in the below screenshot did, there’s a special place in hell waiting for you.

Now that that’s out of the way…

Sports betting content started to appear on what was then TVG in 2018 before the channel rebranded to FanDuel TV in 2022 (TVG2 was then rebranded for a second time, to FanDuel Racing). Some have said the writing was on the wall at that point, but I’m not sold. Rebrands aren’t cheap, this came with the development of a new FanDuel Racing website and app, and while the arrival of sports-focused programming hosted by the likes of Kay Adams and Michelle Beadle certainly carried additional costs, it’s not like this stopped them from airing horse races. I’m not saying parent company Flutter Entertainment saw horse racing as a cash cow when states began legalizing sports betting and online casinos, but acting as though the sport was a red-headed stepchild seems a bit misleading given the evidence.

I’ve also seen takes from some who have decided FanDuel TV’s demise has to do with the horse racing industry at large struggling. There’s a bit of merit to this given the data we have on hand (Ed DeRosa’s weekly tweets with numbers from tracks across the country are required viewing), but it’s also not fully correct, either. From what I’ve been able to dig up, FanDuel TV was hiring right up until this year’s announcement of bad news. That’s not the sign of a business that isn’t supported, nor one where a multi-billion-dollar company has said, “freeze spending, something’s coming.”

(On a somewhat-related note, I’ve also seen a few takes in the vein of, “FanDuel TV actively hurt horse racing.” While I’m not as angry about this take as the one I mentioned at the outset, this is also wrong. Like or dislike whatever programming you want, and pick nits about talent tickets and betting philosophies as much as you want, but having worked there and seen the numbers, hard data shows enhanced FanDuel TV coverage, and enhanced TVG and HRTV coverage before that, actively helped handle and revenue at a number of different tracks. If you didn’t care for certain hosts or content, that’s all well and good, but don’t say your preferences tell one story when data actively refutes it.)

I don’t have anything that would qualify as insider knowledge. I can only read the same tea leaves as everybody else, and the ones I’m seeing (mainly from Flutter Entertainment’s stock price) tell a defined story: As much as this will impact horse racing, and as painful as it is for so many good people within horse racing, this probably wasn’t entirely (maybe even not “mostly”) a horse racing decision.

– – – – –

Nearly 10 years after I left the TVG offices in west Los Angeles for the last time, I’m still proud of the work I did. We were faster at getting major race replays to YouTube than several major racing jurisdictions (to the point where one of them actively complained), and subscriptions to the YouTube channel I managed nearly tripled between when I started at TVG and when I was done. My digital-first content was some of the first of its kind in the industry, from “TVG Extra” track-centric broadcasts to my old “Pre-Game Periscope” show, back when that platform was a thing.

That didn’t come without some internal pushback (including at least one person referring to the space I recorded/broadcast from as the Wackycapsule; no time like the present to identify yourself, whoever you are!), but I wasn’t trying to make anything anyone else did worse or less meaningful. I was trying to get my own seat at the table, and given content everyone else in the space is now doing a decade later (from Twitter Spaces and podcasts to YouTube videos and social media hits), I’d say I was ahead of the game.

My heart breaks for the people I met when I was there. Contrary to what you might see from trolls on Twitter, 99.9% of them are good, solid people who give a damn about this game. We need people like that doing more in this industry, not less, and anything that doesn’t go in that direction is a terrible thing.

Outcry within the horse racing industry has been loud. People are justifiably sad as FanDuel TV personalities work their last shifts and thank those behind the scenes, people the average horseplayer doesn’t know but whose efforts have been considerable over the years.

FanDuel TV will still exist, to a point, for the next several months. Anchor, former colleague, and “friend who once roasted a bachelor party I attended at Disney World” Mike Joyce took to Instagram Friday and reminded followers that the network will still have remote broadcasts at Los Alamitos, Del Mar, and Keeneland through most of November. However, betting handle, which is already going the wrong way, figures to face another challenge, especially at smaller tracks FanDuel TV will no longer spotlight.

There are other media outlets within the game, of course. The NYRA/FOX Sports broadcasts include many former FanDuel TV and TVG employees, both on-air and behind the camera, and they do a great job. Simulcast feeds will still be offered through the RTN network led by Roberts Communications Network and ADW’s like TwinSpires and, yes, FanDuel Racing. A new venture called The Horse Whisperer Network (helmed by Randy Sarf of LSU Stables) has hired a few ex-FDTV people, and while I hope they do well, any guesses I’d make about content they’re set to produce would be just that, guesses.

It sure seems like there just aren’t enough spots for all of the people affected by this business decision, though. 1/ST TV, for instance, was once marketed as the successor to HRTV, but with the exception of a handful of previews for individual races, their site’s content is predominantly videos of workouts. These are immensely valuable, yes, but the interviews and extensive insight of the previous Stronach Group-owned media entity are almost completely absent. Between tracks closing and the daily struggles of the media industry at large, some people who have made significant contributions to the game won’t be around anymore, at least in the short term.

If ever there was a time for the heavy hitters in this sport to come together and do something to prevent/end a crisis, this would be it. That brings me to one final thought: Everyone in the upper crust of the racing industry who has said anything about this, including people who are worth billions and billions of dollars, thinks this is a terrible development that will hurt the game in the long run.

So what’s stopping them from doing something about it?

Santa Anita, California Racing, And Numbers That Don’t Tell The Story

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

The Alameda County Fair opens Friday. For most of the next month, those in Northern California can stop by to enjoy concerts, rides, fried food, and the general…well, fair fare.

What we won’t see, for the second straight summer, is the use of the oldest one-mile dirt track in America. Thoroughbred races in Northern California, of course, haven’t been contested since the fall of 2024.

I wrote about this when it happened, and time hasn’t healed the wounds. As if to throw salt in those wounds, Santa Anita Park’s “end of the meet” press release cited strong handle and attendance. The popular refrain when Northern California racing was “consolidated” was that doing so would save the product in the south.

Before we go much further, a necessary series of reminders: I moved west to work at Santa Anita in 2013. It’s one of the few remaining cathedrals in horse racing, a sport that’s unquestionably better when Santa Anita is humming. Without that move, lots of things change for me, both personally and professionally, and not in a positive way. For those reasons, and a few others, I want Santa Anita to succeed.

Having said that, I’ve looked at the numbers. For what they are, they’re…fine. However, there wasn’t nearly as much as there could have been.

Golden Gate Fields, at the time of its closing, handled roughly $3 million per day. Those were the expectations hoisted upon the ill-fated Golden State Racing venture, which ran Pleasanton in the fall of 2024. When the racing product didn’t meet those expectations (getting to a bit over $1 million per day by the end of the meet after a very rough start), future meets were doomed.

In 2024-25, the first Santa Anita meet without Northern California “competition,” handle rose 10 percent from 2023-24, and field size saw a five-percent bump. It’s…something, but it’s not a full absorption of the Golden Gate handle, by any means. This past meet, all-sources handle remained consistent. Per Horse Racing Nation, average daily handle topped $9 million for the sixth consecutive season. “Consistent” is good, but it shows the closure of Golden Gate Fields and the other NorCal tracks wasn’t the shot in the arm it was sold as.

This prompts a few questions, the first being…where did that Golden Gate handle actually go? The new “B-circuit” for Southern California is in Arizona, but while Turf Paradise’s renovations and upgrades have gotten rave reviews, a May Thoroughbred Daily News article says all-sources handle was up just one percent in a year-over-year comparison.

When Northern California ceased racing, Santa Anita officials made multiple public statements that included promises to NorCal horsepeople. They promised to run races for horses who had been stabled on that circuit, and they delivered on that promise…for a few months. After the first few months of the 2024-25 meet, those races disappeared. Many horses and horsepeople went to other locales (such as Emerald Downs, which had a fantastic 2025 season by basically absorbing handle left behind by the fair tracks), and remaining thoroughbreds from the former “B-circuit” that now had to go against top-tier stock generally ran like…well, horses from a former “B-circuit” that now had to go against top-tier stock.

Santa Anita also boasted that the influx of horses would even allow a return to four-day weeks at the Great Race Place. This never materialized.

Finally, while this provided a slight boost to numbers, consolidating racing to one circuit didn’t solve many of the biggest problems pertaining to California’s industry. Farms in the state aren’t breeding as many horses. Races in the state aren’t funded by subsidies or aided by other arms of the gambling industry. It’s hard to ship horses west to compete, and purses for certain races just aren’t what they are in equal-stature races elsewhere in the country.

I’ve made no secret that Pleasanton was my adopted home track (the folks at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame even enlisted me to write about the fairs in “The Racetracks of America,” something I’ll always be proud of). In a sport where it’s hard to be a fan sometimes, Pleasanton and other fair tracks like Santa Rosa, Fresno, and Ferndale made it easy (Sacramento, not so much; I’m sorry, but that place was a furnace in the summer). With all due respect to tracks like Saratoga, which have plenty of draws for kids and newbies to be introduced to the game we love, there was no lower barrier to entry for fans anywhere in the country than at Northern California fair tracks.

My friend Dennis Miller, with whom I co-hosted daily handicapping seminars outside the Pleasanton grandstand, wrote an article for a local publication this week. It featured some notes from a chat he had with owner, breeder, and NorCal racing ambassador George Schmitt, a truly great guy. The article expresses reason for optimism, which is rare in this industry of late.

Should something materialize at Pleasanton and other fair tracks in the northern part of the Golden State, nobody will be happier about it than yours truly. All of this, however, begs a final, damning question…with a year and a half of hindsight, what good did the cessation of horse racing in Northern California actually do for anything that matters?

If anyone can come up with a positive answer, I’d love to hear it.

Horse Racing Needed Golden Tempo. Now What?

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

Many years ago, my first bosses in turf writing, Joe and Sean Clancy, advised us Saratoga Special interns, “root for the story.” It’s a mantra that’s been in my head since Saturday afternoon, when Golden Tempo shot from last to first to win the 2026 Kentucky Derby.

In this case, the story pretty much writes itself. Golden Tempo is trained by Cherie DeVaux, making her the first female conditioner to saddle a Kentucky Derby winner. Jose Ortiz, wearing the famous black and red silks of Phipps Stable, was the winning jockey, and his winning move outkicked that of brother Irad and the highly-regarded Renegade (who nearly overcame a troubled trip from the rail draw).

For various reasons, horse racing Twitter erupted with a rare sentiment: Positivity. It wasn’t just Golden Tempo backers who were thrilled at the outcome. Fans of the sport got to witness something special, and even losing bettors (self included) couldn’t be upset seeing DeVaux celebrate with her family and friends as she worked her way to the Derby winner’s circle. That, in turn, led to something even more rare: I saw losing handicappers hat-tipping, with regularity, in the direction of the sharp bettors who endorsed a victor that paid $48.24 for a $2 win wager.

Even Mike Repole, the owner of the hard-luck runner-up, couldn’t be too upset. In a video put online by Sean Collins of Blood-Horse, he can be seen bear-hugging Irad Ortiz, Jr., and telling him, among other things, “that’s why you’re the best rider in the country.” Repole’s shtick can be hard to deal with sometimes, but in that moment, he felt…different. He didn’t feel like an outspoken “commissioner” butting heads with others. He felt like someone who, even in defeat, had been moved by what he saw.

Being a horse racing fan tends to be a lonely experience, and for good reason. As a pari-mutuel bettor, you’re putting your money into the pools against wagers from everyone else looking at the race. Tempers can run hot, especially on big days. Against all odds, when it came to the biggest race on the calendar, that didn’t happen. Instead of being something for people to scream at each other about, the Kentucky Derby served as a reminder of why most of us got into the game.

Let me be clear: Saturday at Churchill Downs wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Two races before the Derby, Japanese invader T O Ellis was greater than 10-1 as the field went into the gate for the Churchill Downs. Mid-race, he dropped all the way down to 5-1, and sure enough, the money proved smart. This was a reflection of a growing problem at racetracks across the country, one explained to the masses in a terrific article written by Yahoo’s Dan Wolken.

(Side note: I’ve been around the racing game long enough to say, with some confidence, that if some racing publications had written that piece, there would be significant repercussions for it. As I’m fond of saying, in horse racing, the problem is never the problem, it’s people talking about the problem.)

Horse racing has its issues, and they’ve been growing impossible to ignore. Horse racing Twitter, never an easy audience to fully satisfy in the best of times, has grown restless, and there are valid points to be made. We don’t breed as many horses, the ones we do breed don’t run as much, horse racing isn’t the only gambling game in town anymore, and activity by CAW groups is, for the most part, being met with a collective shrug from industry decision-makers (some of whom are actively benefiting from said activity on a race-by-race basis). Because of this, the day-to-day product has, at times, suffered, and from an outsider’s perspective, it sure doesn’t seem like much is being done to fix issues affecting every aspect of the industry.

Despite all this, though, there we all were Saturday afternoon, watching Cherie DeVaux be engulfed by family and friends after Golden Tempo completed his circling of the 2026 Kentucky Derby field. I said it at the time and I still mean it: I don’t think horse racing Twitter was ever more positive than after that race. It was a beautiful thing to witness, and it’s a reminder of both what we’re capable of as people and what this game is capable of bringing out of us.

The question is, how do we take what we saw Saturday and use it for the benefit of the industry? At a time where the sport has seemed to actively seek out negative momentum, there’s potential for forward movement. Let’s capitalize on it. Let’s remember what this game can do and how capable we are of being decent to one another.

Golden Tempo winning the roses didn’t fix everything. Acting like it did is naive, at best. However, to paraphrase a quote from one of my fictional spirit animals, Toby Zeigler from “The West Wing,” in a battle between our game’s demons and our better angels, for the first time in a long while, I think we just might have ourselves a fair fight.

You know, provided we don’t blow it.

An Airing Of Horse Racing Grievances

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

This week, for the first time in a while, I talked about the health of horse racing and didn’t like what I saw or how I felt after I did it.

In fact, it happened twice, and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Unfortunately, the state this game is in right now isn’t a good one. Cards in the northeast are being cancelled left, right, and center due to weather (in some instances, weather they’d have run in in the past). Woodbine’s closing day program was abandoned midway through the card, with doubts raised over mandatory-payout wagers. Hastings Park in Canada, meanwhile, announced its immediate cessation of racing after British Columbia decided to stop subsidizing racing with slot revenue, and on a related note, The Stronach Group is gearing up for the second round of a fight to decouple horse racing and slots in Florida.

I’d love to be optimistic, but given the circumstances, it’s hard to find silver linings. Because of that, this was the podcast that resulted over on the On the Wrong Lead network…

I don’t like being negative. In fact, I pride myself on being a realist whose content generally ticks people on both sides of any issue off in equal measure. I’ve found that’s a good doctrine of fairness.

(Writer’s note: There are also the people who get ticked off at my mere existence, and that’s a separate issue. I enjoy pushing the buttons of those people because, hate me or love me, you engage with my content and that’s all one can do.)

(Editor’s addition: Remember, boys and girls, that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.)

(Writer’s addition to the addition: Some folks never learned that lesson, and it shows.)

I don’t want to see horse racing decline, wither, and die. I want to see it thrive, and I’ve actively spent time and energy figuring out ways the industry can do this. Everything I have, I owe to this game and a few people in it who cracked the door open for me, allowed me to do a lot, and gave me the chance to build my career.

Very little of what’s happening now, though, inspires confidence. In addition to the track-related factors above, bettors will soon be taxed on some of their losses, which will undoubtedly chase away some of the sport’s highest-handle players. Many within the gambling industry are lobbying to change this after harsh initial outcry, but that will take significant bipartisan cooperation on at least one piece of legislation within the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate (two chambers…not exactly known for working well together of late).

The annual racing symposium at the University of Arizona, meanwhile, had some real head-scratchers. Craig Milkowski has been a friend of mine for more than 20 years, ever since I was posting to the PaceAdvantage board as an underage player. I love him, but I’d like nothing more than a world where the symposium doesn’t have to do a panel on timing races, one where tracks can start and stop watches at appropriate times (you know, the way every other serious sport in the world does). The CAW panel was what it was. Panels on attracting sports betting crossover had the same empty verbiage we’ve seen for years on end. Everyone seems to agree some sort of change is necessary, but beyond that, the stakeholders involved don’t seem to agree on anything else.

I really want to be positive about this game, the one that, at its best, is the best gambling game around. With all of that taken into account, though…wouldn’t that be delusional?

The show went live earlier this week. On Thursday, another piece of news broke involving Saratoga. That track will host a total of 51 racing days in 2026, between the five-day Belmont Stakes Racing Festival, several extra days in early-July, and the 40 days we’ve come to expect at the Spa.

I feel like it’s too much. I tweeted as such (along with a few things designed to push buttons of the “ticked off at my mere existence” people, and BOY, did that work!), and it sparked a lot of conversation. It’s true that 2026 is the last summer before the opening of the new, renovated Belmont Park, which is set to open its doors in September. Having said that, Saratoga has seen days creep up from 24, to 30, to 36, to 40, and now all the way to 51. What was once “the August place to be,” I’d argue, won’t even qualify as a boutique meet next year.

Last year’s calendar was similar, and the effects were far-reaching. Sovereignty won the Travers, we rolled into the week leading up to Labor Day, and all of a sudden, the track looked and felt dead. What came through my television screen wasn’t just a lower-key atmosphere, but one where people looked like zombies because the energy seemed to be flat-out gone. Everything that doesn’t happen often has a saturation point where, once you pass it, it’s not as special anymore. Saratoga found it last year, and it feels like we’re set to pass it again in 2026.

With that, we come back to what I outlined at the start of this article. I wouldn’t be what I am today, professionally or personally, without this game and the opportunities it’s given me. I don’t want to be seen as overly-negative. I don’t want to feel badly about what’s going on in the sport, and I want to be in a position to celebrate the good in it.

However, let’s be honest with ourselves: There just isn’t much positivity to celebrate right now. I don’t know what any of us can do other than call a spade a spade and keep hoping the ship gets righted…but what confidence do we have that those in power can and will make the correct calls to do so?

I’m asking. I wish I had the ability to answer these questions. I don’t, and it bothers me.

No Fairs? Not Fair.

Posted on by Andrew Champagne

The Kubler-Ross model says there are five stages of grief, with acceptance serving as the final one.

When horse racing is involved, I’d argue the model is backwards. It’s very, very easy to accept a beloved circuit or institution dying because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect.

The latest toll of the bell came for the Northern California racing fairs. Long prominent parts of the summer and fall calendar, seasons at Pleasanton, Sacramento, Ferndale, and Fresno will not be conducted by the California Authority of Racing Fairs in 2025.

This announcement, which came Tuesday, was predictable. The Golden State Racing fall meet at Pleasanton didn’t come close to meeting the numbers put up by Golden Gate Fields, which was shuttered by The Stronach Group (more on them later) in June of 2024. Golden State Racing declined to apply for dates in early-2025, and even though Pleasanton still operates as a training center (for the moment), many horses and horsepeople went elsewhere.

The ability to see this news coming, however, doesn’t make it any less painful.

I wrote about the fair circuit being a breath of fresh air last month. I started freelancing in Pleasanton in 2019, and have co-hosted handicapping seminars outside the grandstand for the past several summers. The crowds were kind, the people who worked at the track busted their butts, and the atmosphere blending racing fans with families enjoying everything the fair had to offer was as pleasant as I’ve ever experienced at a horse racing venue.

When Golden Gate Fields closed, the fairs put forth a plan to house year-round racing at Pleasanton. The Stronach Group, which had never been a fan of CARF to begin with, responded by threatening to sell Santa Anita. Apparently, if they didn’t want to conduct racing in Northern California, nobody else should’ve been allowed to do so, either.

Objectively, this entire scenario did not have to happen. Golden Gate Fields may not have been an “A track,” but it generated roughly $3 million in handle per day. The land it sits on is valuable, yes, but it occupies parts of Berkeley and Albany, which makes selling and repurposing it very difficult for zoning purposes. One can’t simply buy the land, tear down the track, and build high-priced condos, but that didn’t stop The Stronach Group from putting these events into motion and trying to close as early as December of 2023.

The theory was that California could no longer support two circuits, and gathering all horses in Southern California would boost the product at Santa Anita. A bit more than a month after Pleasanton’s final race, we can deduce this never held water. Santa Anita’s product is still struggling, and Northern California horses, which had been running against slower stock, have mostly been non-factors in races against their SoCal counterparts. Plans to add an extra day of racing each week and capitalize on an increased headcount of horses have yet to come to fruition, and Northern California horsepeople are, predictably, bitter about promises they say haven’t been kept by the state racing industry’s governing bodies.

This is preferable to the previous status quo…how, exactly? This has hurt a lot of good people, from NorCal racing fans left without a circuit to follow to horsepeople that now have to ply their trades on other circuits (some of which aren’t exactly on stable ground, either). Golden Gate Fields wasn’t on life support, and neither were the fairs. Northern California horse racing didn’t pass away of natural causes. It was murdered.

The Stronach Group’s own tracks have their issues, of course. In a highly-publicized disaster in the making, Gulfstream Park’s horsepeople are being strong-armed into backing decoupling legislation, with only the vague, unwritten promise of support to keep racing at the property going into 2028. In an interview on Pegasus Day, Belinda Stronach said that having racing in an urban environment was not ideal.

(The presence of dozens of other tracks worldwide in major cities would seem to act as an ideal fact-check. However, it doesn’t seem like that matters much to her at the moment.)

Meanwhile, other circuits seem to be hanging by threads. Arizona’s sole operating track, Turf Paradise, battles rumors of closing every few years. Texas horse racing cut back its purses and total race count significantly after several years of resistance against HISA (and, by extension, several years of out-of-state American players not being able to bet on the product). Even New York, which boasts a stable industry, has condensed from three tracks to two and will close Aqueduct when the new Belmont Park opens in 2026.

Again, though, the grim reaper’s ability to come for tracks at any moment is something we’re apparently just supposed to accept, as is the lack of accountability for those who have forced the sport into these situations. We accept this because there’s no alternative we can pursue. We’re supposed to cry for a bit and then, to steal a phrase from the horse racing Twitter crowd, shut up and bet.

In something that, I’m sure, will surprise no one (from the degenerates who think I’m a suit, to the suits who think I’m a degenerate), there’s no shutting up happening here. The fairs didn’t have to die. Unnecessary turmoil, gross mismanagement within the industry, and petty politics took away a source of joy for so many people, not to mention one of the lowest “barriers to entry” at any horse racing venue in the country.

Acceptance is easy, because given those involved in this saga, a terrible end was predictable. The second step of that “five stages of grief” model, however, is anger. That’s the stage that will be toughest to get past.