When 170,000 people show up: Network refresh readies Churchill Downs for Kentucky Derby

Churchill Downs may be best known for the Kentucky Derby’s two-minute spectacle, but behind the scenes, the historic venue is undergoing a network transformation that offers lessons for any enterprise grappling with massive scale, security complexity, and extreme demand variability.

The company recently designated Cisco as its official partner for enterprise networking and network infrastructure and will deploy more than 7,000 switches across its 26 properties, including 12 regional casinos and 18 racing venues. What makes this deployment particularly instructive isn’t just its scale but how Churchill Downs Incorporated (CDI) navigated the transition from a collection of disparate networks to a unified, AI-ready infrastructure capable of handling peak loads that would cripple most enterprise systems. CDI will execute the upgrade shortly after the 2026 Kentucky Derby, which is held on May 2.

The scale challenge

“We’ve more than doubled the size of our entire company in the last three to four years,” says Nate Simon, senior vice president and chief technology officer at CDI. “We’ve built so many gaming floors now across the United States, and we’ve acquired, centralized, and updated systems for 29 casino slash gaming floors now.”

This explosive growth creates a challenge that’s familiar to most enterprises. Newly acquired properties operate on disparate network architectures, have inconsistent security postures, and rely on an operational model that can’t scale. For Churchill Downs, the stakes were particularly high given the unique demands of pari-mutuel wagering, where every bet must reach a central pool at the same moment to calculate accurate odds.

“You have to have every single wager at the same exact point, at the same exact time, to calculate the odds, to put them up on the board, and to pay tickets,” Simon notes. “Any blip in that network, even a few seconds at critical times, and you aren’t getting those wagers, and you aren’t calculating odds.”

The deployment consolidates management in Cisco Catalyst Center, enabling zero-touch provisioning, policy-based automation, and orchestrated rolling upgrades across all CDI properties. But the real transformation goes beyond the hardware refresh.

Designing for extreme variability

Most enterprise networks are designed for relatively consistent load patterns. Churchill Downs faces something entirely different: a facility that might host 50,000 people on a typical day can swell to 170,000-180,000 during Derby Week, with peak demand concentrated in specific time windows.

“It really is all about that week,” Simon explains. “That building on a really big day outside the week of the Kentucky Derby might be 50,000, but on Derby Day it’s 150, 170, or 180,000 people.”

This creates unique design requirements. Entire sections of the facility remain “mothballed” for most of the year but must activate seamlessly during Derby Week. The network must support not only connectivity but also point-of-sale systems that process thousands of transactions simultaneously, IP-based television distribution to thousands of screens, and mobile ticketing for hundreds of thousands of fans—all while maintaining sub-second latency for wagering systems.

Austin Lin, vice president of product management for Cisco’s networking platform, emphasizes the operational transformation enabled by modern network management: “We see dramatic improvements, you know, upwards of 80% in many cases, in many cases more than that as well” in support ticket reduction and operational efficiency.

Security at tier-one event scale

The Kentucky Derby is classified as a SEAR 2 (Special Event Assessment Rating) event, placing it in the same category as major political conventions and championship sporting events. This designation brings federal agencies into the security picture and dramatically elevates cyber defense requirements.

“Historically, we would take our SOC data and Splunk telemetry, and because of the volume of data, it would take up to 40 hours to determine whether an issue was serious,” Simon recalls. “Now, we can do that in a minute or two. We get an alert and see a tremendous reduction in false positives.”

The deployment integrates Splunk Observability Cloud to monitor the entire CDI digital environment, including the performance of the TwinSpires wagering platform and Churchill Downs applications. However, the architecture goes beyond traditional monitoring. CDI implemented automated response capabilities that can immediately disable compromised accounts based on anomaly detection, rather than waiting for human review.

Simon notes that the AI-driven approach proved critical: “The good news is that 99% of our issues are false positives. Even better, 99% of those false positives are no longer reaching us, because that data is flowing through very rapidly.”

Modernization without disruption

One of the most instructive aspects of CDI’s deployment is how it modernized legacy systems without disrupting operations. The company replaced coaxial-based television distribution with IP-based delivery across the facility, enabling centralized control of thousands of displays and dramatically reducing latency.

“When we were smaller, we still had no IPTV solution,” Simon explains. “There were thousands of TVs and remotes. As we’ve rolled out new sections and refreshed old ones, we’ve been deploying all the Cisco equipment to provide that super-fast access for those TVs.”

The change will deliver operational benefits beyond connectivity. Patrons will be able to request channel changes via self-service interfaces, and CDI can centrally deliver targeted advertising and sponsorship content, monetizing infrastructure that previously required manual intervention.

Lessons for enterprise network engineers

CDI’s deployment offers several actionable insights for network professionals in other industries:

1. Standardization enables scale. Simon emphasizes that achieving their current growth trajectory would have been impossible without network standardization: “You can’t be building custom cars every time you go to roll something out. You need the automation.”
2. Design for your peak, not your average. While most enterprises optimize for typical load, organizations with highly variable demand must architect for peak capacity while remaining cost-effective during low-utilization periods. Churchill Downs deploys 50,000 feet of temporary copper cabling each Derby Week to extend point-of-sale and connectivity beyond the facility’s normal boundaries.
3. Automation reduces the operational burden. The shift to Catalyst Center freed CDI’s network team from configuration and troubleshooting, allowing them to focus on higher-value automation and security initiatives. “Those teams are way more focused on automation,” Simon notes, “not on running around validating false positives.”
4. Observability drives security posture. Integrating with Splunk reduced CDI’s mean time to validate security alerts from 40 hours to under two minutes. For organizations facing sophisticated threats, this speed can mean the difference between containment and compromise.
5. Plan infrastructure for emerging use cases. While CDI’s immediate focus was on standardization and scale, Simon is already exploring computer vision for horse-safety monitoring and turf-quality assessment—use cases enabled by ubiquitous, high-bandwidth connectivity but not originally specifiedin the requirements.

Lin points to these emerging applications as the next frontier: “There’s a lot of new computer vision use cases that are popping up, whether it’s not just physical security, but what can you do on top of that in a video stream.”

The bottom line

Churchill Downs’ network refresh shows that even organizations with legacy infrastructure and extreme operational variability can execute modern network transformations. The key is treating networking not as an isolated infrastructure but as the foundation for operational efficiency, security, and future innovation.

For the 350,000+ fans attending Kentucky Derby Week, the network upgrade ensures seamless mobile ticketing, high-speed access to the betting platform, and real-time sharing of high-definition content. Behind the scenes, it enables CDI to operate at a scale that would have been impossible with their previous architecture—all while dramatically improving security posture and reducing operational overhead.

As Simon prepares for the 152nd Kentucky Derby, he’s confident the infrastructure will perform: “It’s not super sexy, but it’s vitally important—getting point-of-sale systems to work and creating seamless experiences where patrons can meander in and everything just works.”

That’s the true measure of network success: when 170,000 people show up for the most exciting two minutes in sports, and nobody notices the infrastructure at all.

An aerial shot taken on Derby Day in 2024 shows the backside, infield and frontside of Churchill Downs Racetrack.

Churchill Downs Inc.