Ed Chamberlin reacts to ITV's new contract to cover racing

After what seems like an endless stream of bad news for the sport, I’m thrilled to be able to bring a little bit of good news in that horse racing will be staying on terrestrial television for the next three years.

It’s been a long process but finally an agreement has been reached.

I’ve always said terrestrial television is so important for this sport – and the last few weeks have given us an incredible opportunity to engage with a new audience.

2.3million people watched the Derby at Epsom, over one million saw the Northumberland Plate, 1.2m Stradivarius winning at Goodwood.

Those numbers show the power of terrestrial TV and with the new deal now done, we have the opportunity to build on that. We won’t sit still.

When we started out in January 2017 our remit was to increase the popularity of racing and I’m delighted we’ve been able to do that – on what has been quite a journey. It started in slightly disastrous fashion at Cheltenham on New Year’s Day.

To have the first shot on ITV behind Oli Bell being that of a groom having a wee against a horse box lorry wasn’t the ideal start. Then a monsoon swept in that made Sir Anthony McCoy even more miserable than usual and reduced Luke Harvey to tears. It was a testing start.

To then be given stick on social media, be told on Andover High Street I was useless and described in one broadsheet as being about as exciting as a set of a self-assembly draws from Ikea, told me I’d need thick skin in this job.

It was always going to take time for the sport to sync with a new broadcaster and in those early days we got an awful lot wrong.

But all the time viewing numbers have increased and if we can survive presenting from our living rooms during a lockdown then I’m pretty sure we can survive anything.

Switching from presenting football to racing was by far the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced in my career and the challenge we still face is summed up by timeline on twitter over the last 24 hours.

That has shown just how poisonous that medium has become but also how impossible it is to please the entire racing audience.

There are people asking for more of this and less of that, some want more horses, some less, more social stable, less of it, more analysis, less analysis.

Our job is to find the best balance.

It would be easy for me to appease those on twitter and broadcast to a sophisticated, engaged, racing audience but that is not our brief. The large proportion of our audience is taken up by people who worked hard during the week and just want to relax and be entertained on a Saturday afternoon.

I owe a thank-you to so many people who have worked hard to finalise a very complicated deal. The racecourses could not have been more helpful over the last three-and-a-half years, particularly with some of our more bizarre requests. But there are two parties I want to thank above the others.

Firstly it’s racing participants. We’ve tried really hard to involve owners and grooms in our coverage and really appreciate their help, particularly over the last few weeks when we’ve had to introduce zoom calls.

Then there’s the horses. I’m always looking for hooks to get people watching horseracing – and what’s better than a superstar horse? How lucky have we been on ITV to have the likes of Enable, Tiger Roll, Stradivarius and Battaash as our headline acts.

The second body are the team that I work with who have become like family, and that’s from the top down.

Niall Sloane and Mark Demuth at ITV Sport put a lot of faith in a presenter who’d been working in football for over 20 years. I’ll always appreciate that.

And by introducing a rule where all the team had to meet at 6pm the night before whether it be Sir Anthony McCoy or the runner, we’ve created an amazing bond that hopefully shows on screen.

We now have a formidable rounders side, for example – captained by Hayley Turner and unbeaten at York against the downtrodden Sporting Life outfit over recent years.

One thing I know about the ITV Racing team is we won’t stand still for a second. We'll always listen to people’s input and always look to improve. I’m so pleased we’ve got another three years in which to do that.

As for the things I’m most proud of over the first three-and-a-half years, well firstly there’s winning the BAFTA for our coverage of the 2017 Randox Health Grand National, by some distance the highlight of my career in television.

Then there’s the ratings. Over the weekend when I knew the deal might finally get over the line I read through all the cuttings from when ITV were announced as the new broadcast partner for racing with myself as presenter. It was days before Leicester won the Premier League title.

The overriding negative headline was the fear that racing might disappear into the backwaters of ITV4. I’m so pleased that’s not even a story anymore. It’s well documented that our figures on the main channel are up 82% but ITV4 are now 2% up, year-on-year, compared to the corresponding days in 2016. That’s something I’m very proud of.

Having a couple of months ago thought this new deal might not happen I launched my own media training business and contemplated a career away from broadcasting.

It’s relief rather than elation that ITV will continue to show racing but at the end of the day we are only the custodians of the television rights with the task of making racing accessible to all and as popular as possible.

No stone will be left unturned in the continued pursuits of those goals.

In the meantime I’ll head to Ascot this weekend with a spring in my step and celebrate the news with a glass of something special – and a scotch egg.