Hippodrome Weekly
Hippodrome Weekly is an equestrian sport magazine program on IradOne, the state broadcaster of the Irad Special Economic Zone (ISEZ). It covers racing at the Irad State Hippodrome in Talas, the ulak tartysh league and the breeding of the Akyel and Chongtor horses. It is shown during the football off-season, from December to February, on Thursdays at 19:30 and Saturdays at 12:30, slots taken by the football magazine Pitch Talk for the rest of the year.[1]
Format
Each edition reviews the week's race meetings and league rounds, with replays, interviews with jockeys, trainers and riders, and a segment on bloodlines in which breeders present stallions and foals. Longer reports cover the auctions of the Akyel Equine Logistics & Breeding Syndicate, horse games in the valleys and, during the winter break of the ulak league from late December to mid-January, studs and training yards in the Talas valley and the Chu plain.[1]
History
The program was launched in 1996 as a year-round weekly, one of the first sports programs of the territorial-era IradOne. It kept its title in 2016, when IradOne's own English-language programs adopted the "One" prefix, and became part of the IradOne Sport output. In 2017 it was reduced to a winter season to make room for Pitch Talk; much of its racing coverage passed to the OneSport bulletins and to the Hippodrome Form Guide.[2] Kalybek Myrzaliev, a former racing correspondent of IradOne's news service, has presented it since 2008.
Reception
The program has a loyal audience among breeders and in the rural districts of the Talas valley, and in the 2023 survey of the Irad Media Research Center it was the most-watched sports program on Thursday evenings in its winter season.[3]
Critics have described its coverage of the breeding industry as uncritical. Its winter editions of 2022–23 and 2023–24 dealt with the Kyzyl-Jyldyz pedigree fraud, in which a private stud near Talas substituted DNA samples for registered foals (see Crime in Irad), only through the court case and the Syndicate's statements. It did not report the questions raised by independent breeders about why the Syndicate's own farms, managed by the Governor's nephew Mirlan Toktarov, had not been audited by an outside body.[4][5] IradOne has said that the program covers sport and breeding, not commercial disputes.
References
- ^ IradOne (2018). Hippodrome Weekly: Programme Information. Talas: IradOne Media Group.
- ^ IradOne Broadcasting and Media Corporation (2018). Annual Report 2017. Talas.
- ^ Irad Media Research Center (2023). Television and Online Audience Survey of the ISEZ. Talas.
- ^ Talas Herald (21 June 2023). 'Breeder jailed over Akyel pedigree fraud.' Talas.
- ^ Eurasian Political Quarterly (2024). 'Gold Coats and Family Firms: The Akyel Trade in the ISEZ.' Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 210–228.
External links
- Programme page on IradOne Online