How Ed Chamberlin became a RACING CERT
‘The thing I find amazing is a lot of people in the sport don’t seem to want ITV to succeed’
RARELY does a day go by when Ed Chamberlin isn’t asked by someone in the street why he left Premier League football for racing.
It has been 18 months since he became ITV Racing’s presenter — or ‘quarterback’ and conductor, as he likes to describe his role — and still there is the assumption that he must be mad.
Never does the constant questioning annoy him, in fact he says he ‘loves’ telling them about what he considers his dream job.
Hearing him barely draw breath as he reflects on a ‘terrific’ four days at York’s Ebor Festival last week confirms he is not harbouring any hope of a return to Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football studio.
Striking a balance between appealing to hard-core racing fans and engaging new audiences is a mighty challenge for Chamberlin, who grew up watching racing with his grandfather.
At York, the solution was Chamberlin and his co-presenter, Francesca Cumani, i, racing a Porsche and a Bentley ley around a nearby airfield, to simulate mualius the relative qualities of Stradivarius and Battaash, two of the equine A- listers rs in action.
‘We have to broaden n racing’s audience. We have to,’ Chamberlin, n, 44, told Sportsmail. . ‘ There are a lot of f people who would say y this might be racing’s s last- chance saloon with terrestrial television. It is a twofold balance for me, we’ve got to keep th the racing i aficionados happy with the quality of our product. And on the other side of the coin, we need to entertain.’
Looking at the ratings paints a reassuring picture of how he and his team performed on the Knavesmire. Across the four days, they averaged 510,000 viewers, compared to 485,000 in 2017, and they were way up on Channel 4’s audience from 2016.
Despite the promising figures, Chamberlin has learned never to stand still. And so, he admits, he is already thinking about how they can improve their coverage of next year’s Ebor.
He will not rest on his laurels after winning a Bafta for last year’s Grand National coverage either, saying: ‘The Grand National is always l on my mind, id which hi h might i ht make me sound like a loony.’
Similarly to senior director and executive producer Paul McNamara, who also masterminded ITV’s World Cup coverage, Chamberlin is constantly thinking about how they can innovate.
One area Chamberlin is keen to work on is the collaboration with jockeys, thus avoiding what he considers to be the ‘disconnect between fan and player’ in football. Both he and McNamara would love to see a tracking and timing system like in Formula One One, where viewers would be able to see where each horse is positioned in the field and how quickly they are going.
‘That would be the holy grail,’ says Chamberlin. Yet, as McNamara told Sportsmail earlier this summer, such a change would require the ‘whole racing family coming together under one umbrella’.
In the meantime, the coverage is constantly being tweaked, whether in the form of new cameras or the ‘jockey masterclasses’ that were introduced at York. There are also ideas that have been ‘stolen’ from h how other th countries t i d do racing i coverage, including speaking to losing jockeys on their way back into the weighing room, which was pinched from Japan.
Chamberlin is also inspired by the way other sports are televised. ‘I learnt a lot on Monday Night
Football from the technology and working with Gary (Neville) and then with Jamie (Carragher). I loved their attitude that if you’re going to do something, you do it properly and to the best of your ability. Elsewhere there is lots that I like. I like watching sport abroad, I think America sets the standard in a lot of sport we watch.
‘I love the Sky Sports cricket team, who I think are excellent, in particular Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain. They have that warmth and variety that I hope we have got in ITV racing.’
As is demonstrated by Chamberlin admitting to feeling uncomfortable when the divisive betting ring presenter Matt Chapman calls him ‘Chief’, it is clear he considers the entire team to be of huge importance.
He describes Cumani, 35, who cut her teeth in Australia and is the daughter of two-time Epsom Derby-winning trainer Luca Cumani, as the hardest working presenter he has ever worked with.
Meanwhile, Chapman is a ‘weapon’, and he credits Oli Bell with coming up with several ways to appeal to younger viewers.
Those include Social Stable, a segment of the show that invites viewers to send in questions, photos and videos and is unsurprisingly heavy on mentions of social media. It has not been unanimously popular, to say the least. But Chamberlin will have none of it, insisting that ‘we need to go with the times and we need to change’. He adds: ‘I called York on Friday ‘‘Fab Friday’’ to try to engage new people and particularly a younger audience.
‘For some people y you would think I h had committed a terrible sin, but it was worth a try.’
The criticism doesn’t bother him — he has become fairly u used to it over the ye years, recalling how hi his first Monday Night Fo Football show ‘trended gl globally (on Twitter) fo for all the wrong rea reasons’.
T There is also a calmness ne and perspective that has co come from battling stomach canc cancer at the age of 35.
Yet, while he can handle the trolling, Chamberlin appears baffled by the resistance from some deep within the industry.
‘The thing I always find amazing is that a lot of people in racing don’t seem to want ITV to succeed,’ he says with an air of exasperation.
He might not be sure what the future holds for ITV Racing when the contract comes up in 2020, but one thing he is sure about is that the best thing for racing — for everyone, from the breeders to the bookmakers to the stable staff — is for it to remain on terrestrial television.
In a month when golf fans have needed a brand new platform to watch the USPGA and tennis fans need a subscription to Amazon to watch the US Open, he says: ‘Racing doesn’t realise how lucky it is.’