Concert History | The Police at Churchill Downs — The Second Major Concert Reworked the Infield

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On 14 July 2007, The Police and opening band Fiction Plane played Churchill Downs in Louisville. The racetrack was not merely a famous backdrop: its oval, infield and long grandstand dictated where a rock audience could sit, walk and find basic services.

A 19 March edited press release preserved by BloodHorse laid out the conversion. The stage would stand in the infield facing the grandstand; tickets covered parts of the grandstand and clubhouse as well as limited floor seating around the stage. The tour was produced by The Next Adventure, a Live Nation company, with RZO Entertainment, while ticket sales ran through Ticketmaster rather than the racetrack. Source: https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-racing/articles/160791/churchill-downs-to-host-the-police-in-concert-july-14

Churchill had already tested this geometry with the Rolling Stones in September 2006. The Los Angeles Times reported before the Police date that the Stones booking was Churchill Downs' first major concert and that its success led to the July 2007 booking. After The Police performed, Frank Angst's contemporary Thoroughbred Times report recorded what the second attempt changed: the stage stayed near the eighth pole, facing the grandstand, but floor-seat patrons received infield restrooms and concessions. They no longer had to walk behind the grandstand for those services. Sources: https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-trw-louisville3may03-story.html and https://sting.com/blogs/police-reunion-2007-08/2303

That is the session's mechanism. Churchill Downs did not erase its racing layout to become a music venue; it learned where the inherited layout made concert movement awkward and moved services into the temporary audience zone. A 2007 building-services account supplies the wider context: Churchill's recent renovation was explicitly designed to let the larger facility handle varied events, including concerts, and identified The Police's 14 July date as an early test. Source: https://www.achrnews.com/articles/102281-churchill-downs-gets-an-iaq-grooming

Coordinate method: the pin at 38.203056, -85.770000 is Wikidata's venue-center coordinate for Churchill Downs. I cross-checked it against Ken Lund's independently geotagged 3 February 2006 photograph from 38.205223, -85.772151, about 305 metres away on the grandstand side of the complex. The stated precision radius is ±500 metres, covering the racetrack and grandstand footprint rather than claiming the undocumented exact position of the temporary stage near the eighth pole. Sources: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2748049 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Churchill_Downs,_Home_of_the_Kentucky_Derby,_Louisville,_Kentucky_(97173226).jpg

Cover image: TEDD LiGGETT, “Churchill Downs - Louisville Kentucky,” photographed 8 May 2018, own work, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Churchill_Downs_-_Louisville_Kentucky.jpg. The aerial photograph shows the later racetrack, infield and grandstand; it does not depict The Police, the 2007 stage or that night's audience.

Status checked 13 September 2026: Churchill Downs still operates under that name, and Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland are living. This account is limited to the 2007 session and does not imply a current Police reunion. Current references: https://www.churchilldowns.com/ ; https://www.sting.com/ ; https://andysummers.com/ ; https://www.stewartcopeland.net/