Sky Sports Racing Fixture Puts Hexham Back in the Spotlight

Hexham stands tall as the only racecourse in Northumberland, and on Tuesday 20 October it runs a fixture it has never staged before: a raceday branded specifically for Sky Sports Racing, gates open from noon, six races between 2:01pm and 4:50pm.

It's a small addition to a very large calendar. The British Horseracing Authority's official fixture list for 2026 runs to 1,458 scheduled meetings across 52 Premier Racedays, in the BHA's own words, designed to help fans "identify and engage with British racing's showpiece occasions" as the sport tightens its programme. Hexham’s grass roots programme rarely reaches the dizzy heights of Premier status, but it’s no less competitive for that.

Hexham sits in a natural amphitheatre at Yarridge Heights, roughly 800 feet above town, but race footage rarely does the course justice. A left-handed National Hunt track with racing on the site dating back around two hundred years, it moved there from Tyne Green in the early 19th century after a ten-year hiatus in the 1880s, and jump racing is all it has ever staged. It isn't a course built with a grandstand television gallery in mind, and the view from the top of the enclosure over the Northumberland moors has traditionally been as much of a draw for a day out as the racing itself, the kind of detail that rarely makes it into a betting preview but tends to be the first thing regulars mention to first-timers. This is where those able to attend win themselves a more holistic racing experience than the two-dimensional view on TV.

For a course that runs on jump racing alone, live television carries more weight than it would at a flatter, bigger venue built for crowds rather than cameras. Viewers watching from the sofa rather than the enclosure tend to shop around before a televised card, and that habit is exactly why sites collecting current free bet offers exist at all: comparing sign-up terms across half a dozen bookmakers takes a few minutes, and most of that comparison happens in the hour before the first race rather than days out. It's a habit built by broadcast racing generally, not by any one fixture, but a course's first appearance under a new banner is usually when that habit gets tested for the first time on that specific track. ITV Racing’s November showing from Hexham was a good case in point.

Hexham isn't the only course adjusting to that shift, and it won't be the last. Sky Sports Racing launched as a dedicated channel back in 2018, with live coverage of over 650 fixtures a year across the UK, and it has kept adding tracks to that schedule ever since, both in the UK and further afield. What started as a replacement for an older racing channel has become the default way most jump-racing fans watch a Tuesday-afternoon card that would otherwise be visible only from the rail. 

Published by Peter McNeile 20/08/2026