Churchill Downs is betting a new expansion of horse racing will succeed.
During Thursday’s earnings call, CEO Bill Carstanjen said the Thoroughbred Championship Series (TCS), which will debut next year, will be a boon for the sport and financially beneficial to the operator.
“I couldn’t be more excited about TCS,” Carstanjen said during the call. “It’s something that hasn’t existed in horse racing, which has historically been built around specific marquee events that haven’t really been successfully linked together, at least not sufficiently in recent times.”
Revenue for the third quarter of 2026 was $696 million, up $13 million or 2% year-over-year. Net income was $80 million in the quarter versus $38 million in 3Q25. Adjusted EBITDA reached $264 million, up $2 million or 1% year-over-year. All reported figures are quarterly records.
Carstanjen noted the idea for the TCS was to take some days that already exist on the horse racing calendar and add some new events to “create entirely new big days.” The series, a collaboration with the New York Racing Association, will kick off next year with the Kentucky Derby and include sequentially the Belmont Stakes; the Matt Winn States at Churchill Downs Racetrack; the Jim Dandy Stakes and the Travers Stakes, both at Saratoga Racetrack in New York; and the TCS Championship Race at Churchill Downs.
“I think you’ll see significant wagering contributions right away,” Carstanjen said. “These are going to be great races with well-known horses and what the fans, both casual and serious hardcore fans, like is the very best racing against each other. We’re forcing or encouraging these horses to back-to-back race against each other; (it) is going to be great for wagering.”
Kentucky Derby ratings for last year indicate that there’s an appetite for the new series. Viewership peaked at 24 million and the average viewership during Derby coverage was 19-20 million.
“Those are extraordinary numbers and you put those up against the World Series, you put those up against the NBA, you put those up against the Masters, football, college and pro, those are really, really incredible numbers,” Carstanjen said. “And that takes work to build a television experience with our NBC partners that is good every year to build and deliver those kinds of ratings.
“We spend a lot of time on social media and those are also numbers that we put up against anybody,” Carstanjen added. “Our increasing social media impressions, all of those metrics, we track very closely, and they all are driving forward at a really great rate. And those eventually feed into the other metrics of wagering or sponsorship or higher television deals, et cetera. But you have to do the work on those every single year, because you have to show a pattern.”
Recently, VISA was named the preferred payment partner of Churchill Downs and the 153rd Kentucky Derby in 2027. Carstanjen says that in the future, he envisions more such deals with TCS as a way to drive value.
“We’ll be working not only with our own current sponsors and with our folks at Churchill Downs Racetrack, but with our partners at the New York Racing Association, who own Belmont Park outside of Manhattan, and then Saratoga, to see what we can what we can do to drive our pipeline, which is already really strong, and to further monetize that and expand that as we go from a week of greatness with the (Kentucky) Derby to five months (the time frame of TCS) of assets and properties, around which we can build.”
Churchill Downs is also in the process of selling nine regional properties, including Calder Casino in Miami Gardens, Florida, and Presque Isle Downs & Casino in Erie, Pennsylvania.
“Each property has been marketed individually,” Carstanjen said. “Some might go to the same the same buyer or they all go individually. That remains to be seen.
“But the short answer is full speed ahead. We feel very good about where we are. We expect to execute transactions by the end of the year and the process has been what we hoped and expected it would be.”
