I’ve been a racing fan for almost 50 years. I’ve spent many a happy day at the racetrack. But I’m coming to the conclusion that the people who run the sport aren’t all that much smarter than the horses that run the races. I’ve written before on some of the ills of the sport; all of them remain and some have become worse.
The fan base for horseracing is very old and the people who run the sport have not succeeded in attracting younger fans. All you have to do to see the veracity of that statement is to go to any racetrack or any off-track betting establishment on any racing day other than Triple Crown race days and look at the folks in attendance. Or, you could go to any of the major Las Vegas sports books on a random football weekend, observe the age of the folks watching and wagering on the football games and compare them to the ones watching and wagering on the horse races. I have not come to some grand conclusion here that would attract the attention of a Nobel Prize Committee; this is as obvious as can be.
When I hear the people who run racing say that there is a growing young fan base and they support that conclusion by pointing to the huge crowds that show up in the infields for Triple Crown races in Kentucky and Baltimore, I know they are deep into self-delusion. Those young folks are not there to watch racing or wager on racing; they are there for partying, drinking and debauchery. If all those folks loved racing so much, they’d be at the track every six weeks or so and that’s simply not the case.
Folks who own and operate racetracks seem not to understand the law of supply and demand. They earn revenue by taking a portion of the handle and paying out the rest of the wagers to the people with winning tickets. It does not take a genius to realize that this business model only works if the customers continue to bring new money to the game. Think for a moment. If you put 100 bettors in a locked room each with $1000 to wager and kept them there for a week doing nothing but betting, the racetrack would wind up with almost $100,000. Eventually, no one would have enough money left to make a minimum wager. So, the business challenge for a racetrack is to continually find ways to bring new money to the track so it can find its way through the betting windows.
So what usually happens when revenues decline? First thing a track will do is to cut services at the track. There will be fewer mutual windows open and less attention to “amenities” such as coats of paint and clean restrooms. Miraculously, those kinds of actions don’t attract new fans. Who woulda thunk that? So, the racetrack operators move on to step two and increase the take-out from the betting handle. That solves the problem in the very short term but remember, the more the track takes out from the handle the sooner those 100 bettors locked in a room with nothing to do but bet on races will go broke.
A few racetrack operators have tried to keep the take-out percentages the same but offer more races as a way to increase the handle. That doesn’t work for several reasons including the fact that it does not bring new money to the track. In addition, more races usually mean shorter fields which mean lower odds which mean diminished betting interest which means lower handles. More of the races added in this scenario are usually at the very bottom of the racing quality spectrum because those races offer the smallest purses. Low quality racing does not attract new money to the track and low quality racing turns off the fans who come to the track regularly. In short, it doesn’t work.
This is all based on the law of supply and demand. If you want more people to come to the track, you have to offer them a product they want to come and see. That does not mean adding a picnic grounds with a Ferris wheel for kids; if parents want to do that, they can take their rug rats to Danny Boy Snyder’s Six Flags Amusement Park. What it does mean is that the track has to put on races involving good horses that people can begin to identify with and follow. That is just not happening. Oh, and it might be a good idea for the racetrack operators to reduce the take-out from the handle for the short term as they put on fewer races at higher quality levels to entice more fans to come back regularly. That’s what other businesses do successfully to stimulate revenues; they put things on sale.
The latest bad idea in racing is to expand the Breeders’ Cup to 11 races and to make this a two-day event. You can read for yourself the blather about why this expansion is such a wonderful idea from the Breeders’ Cup Ltd folks. But the one explanation that is really stupid was that there were some horses who just didn’t have a race suited for them in the Breeders’ Cup. So they added things like “fillies and mares going 7 furlongs” and a “juvenile turf race”. No one has been sitting around since the inception of the Breeders’ Cup questioning why they didn’t have those races carded; even now, they still have holes in the racing opportunities. Where is the two-mile race for horses that love to run really slowly forever and ever? Where is the 4-furlong dash?
There are already too many juvenile races. The purpose of the Breeders’ Cup was to keep horses racing longer; paying out huge purses to two year olds only encourages owners to take the syndication money offered to them to send the horses to the breeding shed early. If the Breeders’ Cup folks want to keep horses in training longer, they ought to consider cutting out the races for two year olds and making it more expensive for any foals of animals who went to the breeding shed under the age of four or five to be eligible for Breeders’ Cup races.
If these folks thought like that, they’d have more good horses racing instead of breeding and that would allow racetrack operators to card more high quality races which would attract larger handles … But that’s not the way these people think. In fact, what they’ve done with these new races is to render a Grade II race at Aqueduct moot. The $150,000 First Flight Handicap is a filly/mare race at seven furlongs; it is run on the last weekend of October. Now there is a filly/mare race in the Breeders’ Cup run that same weekend with a purse of $1M. Look for the quality of the field in the First Flight Handicap to take a nosedive. The NYRA is already in financial trouble; how this kind of predatory scheduling is supposed to help that situation is mysterious to me.
Maybe things would be better if the horses ran the track and the people ran the races?
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…