The Kentucky Derby hit a viewership high for one of the closest finishes in the history of the race.
The race portion of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby averaged a 7.5 rating and 16.7 million viewers on NBC (15.9 million per Nielsen fast-nationals, plus a streaming audience of 714,000 per Adobe Analytics) — marking the largest audience for the event since 1989 on ABC. The race had a 27 share, the highest for the Derby since NBC began airing the race in 2001.
Ratings increased 9% and viewership 13% from last year (6.9, 14.8M), with the linear audience up 10% (from 14.44M) and streaming viewership up a sharp 92% (from 371K).
The three-way photo finish — in which Mystik Dan edged Sierra Leone and Forever Young — peaked with 20.1 million viewers from 7-7:15 PM ET, the largest peak audience for the race since it began airing on NBC in 2001.
The 35-year high comes with some caveats. On a Nielsen-only basis, viewership was only the highest in five years — since the controversial 2019 edition that saw apparent winner Maximum Security stripped of his victory in a postrace review (16.34M).
That 2019 race was also the final Derby before Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates, meaning that it would have almost certainly beaten this year’s across-all-platforms audience all things being equal.
Sans the out-of-home and streaming factors, the historical comparisons are less favorable. This year’s 7.5 household rating is actually the fourth-lowest for the race in the NBC era.
If not quite an unqualified success, this year’s Derby still occupies an enviable position on the sports viewership hierarchy. The race averaged more viewers than any game of the past two NCAA men’s basketball tournaments and every NBA or Major League Baseball game since 2019. For the year so far, the only sporting events with a larger audience were football games and the NCAA women’s basketball national championship.
