Racing has made strides in recent years in addressing the timing of its races in an effort to prevent events from going off at the same time but as any regular viewer of FanDuel TV knows, the split screen is still needed at times when gates open moments apart at major tracks.
At The Jockey Club Round Table Conference on Matters Pertaining to Racing July 31 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., an executive and scientist from Fastbreak AI showcased a study that saw some success in improving racing's schedule. Most importantly, the study reported a 3% increase in handle for the tracks that participated.
Fastbreak AI already uses its technology to optimize the NBA's schedule, ensuring that arenas are available, teams have reasonable travel schedules, and top games are timed to optimize interest through television partners. New chairman of The Jockey Club Everett Dobson is a part-owner of the NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder and he reached out to Fastbreak AI to see what it could do for racing.
Dr. Ryan Kelley, the principal data scientist and machine learning engineer for Fastbreak AI, outlined how the company looked at all aspects of a race schedule to optimize the off times for each track. He said while racing has made improvement on initial scheduling, the artificial intelligence technology proved especially adept at adjusting schedules on days where race times are changed because a track has an issue such as a gate malfunction, weather delay, or other circumstance.
"By optimizing the time, we were able to reduce the overlap for all these races by 20% and when we ran it through the model, it showed that we predicted an increase in handle by 3% for this given day," Kelley said. "We did that same exercise over all of 2024. We compared the prediction of the schedule before we ran the optimization and after. And what this shows is that we had an increase in the total handle of 3% which mapped to about $360 million give or take.
"So this is a fairly significant increase in handle just from a simple tweak in the schedule, which is to reduce the overlap."
Fastbreak AI CEO and co-founder John Stewart said after the presentation that at this point, they've completed the feasibility study. He said tracks will have to come on board to make it a successful reality, but he noted the 3% increase in handle seen in that initial study should provide a carrot toward bringing people together.
Thursday's Round Table also included a discussion on how sports and racing are adapting to changing weather. New York Racing Association executive vice president of operations and capital projects Glen Kozak noted that the new Belmont Park facility will feature a number of environmentally friendly ideas that also will improve operations.
One of those features will be the use of reclaimed water.
"Underneath all the surfaces is infrastructure that's being built to be able to handle storm water that's then repurposed for the irrigation, not only from the infield, but also steps have been taken to capture storm water off of the building," Kozak said. "These are millions and millions of gallons each year that we're able to now repurpose."
That panel noted that all outdoor sports have been impacted by climate change, including racing, which has seen increased cancellations tied to hurricanes, wet weather, winter storms, extreme heat, and even poor air quality tied to wildfires.
