New media rights group backs Sandown

Sandown's enhanced April Finale meeting will be sponsored by attheraces, it was revealed today.

The initiative forms the centrepiece of a ground-breaking £2 million one-year marketing deal between racing's new media-rights company and Britain's elite 12 racecourses. The deal also marks the end of Sandown's association with brewers Whitbread, who have sponsored the Finale's Saturday feature Gold Cup event for the past 45 years.

Comprising Channel 4, BSkyB and Arena Leisure, the attheraces consortium secured in June a £307 million contract with 49 of Britain's 59 racecourses for their media rights. The remaining ten signed up to rival bidders, GG-Media.

Britain's top-class tracks - the socalled Super 12 of Aintree, Ascot, Cheltenham, Doncaster, Epsom, Goodwood, Haydock, Kempton, Newbury, Newmarket, Sandown and York - all march under the attheraces banner.

This new contract secures, with immediate effect, extensive branding and exposure for attheraces at all 12 elite tracks until 31 January 2003, with an option to renew. It includes innovative commercial branding of starting stalls and stalls-handlers on all 94 races broadcast on terrestrial TV - even, for the first time, at Royal Ascot.

But Sandown has signed a sponsorship contract for two years for its twoday Finale meeting carrying prize money of £395,000 broadcast by Channel 4 and coined the 'attheraces Gold Cup Celebration Meeting'.

The fixture, which marks the end of the National Hunt season but also features high-class Group-race action on the Flat, was enhanced last season when the track ran approximations of jumping's 'championship' events to compensate for their loss at the Cheltenham Festival due to foot-and-mouth disease.

Last month, Sandown decided to make a virtue out of that accidental success by introducing similar events in their own right at the track. The final programme for the two days is yet to be decided, but attheraces will sponsor the entire Saturday card and a key National Hunt event on the Friday.