A Perma-Site for the Breeders’ Cup
Kentucky Derby-winning owner-breeder Bill Casner is the latest to take up the argument advocating Santa Anita as a permanent site for the Breeders’ Cup. In a column for the Blood-Horse, he hits all the major points — weather, media market access, facilities, financial advantages, the global racing calendar — and concludes pragmatically:
The time is right to make Santa Anita the permanent venue. It is the correct business decision for the Breeder’s Cup event and the future of our industry.
I’ve refrained from commenting on the BC site debate so far, since it’s not one for which I can claim — or expect much assumption of — objectivity. I’ve done some work for the Breeders’ Cup, I welcome any reason to visit Santa Anita, and it’s probably fair to say I’m pro-synthetic surface. But there’s something about the tone of Casner’s piece that signals whatever the discussion among the BC board members, of which Casner is one, about whether to select a permanent site or establish a rotating site schedule, it’s over — all that’s left is coming to an agreement with the likely permanent host site.
So, what will it mean for American racing if the Breeders’ Cup settles at Santa Anita? The game will be more international (in wagering and participants), the event will attract more media attention (as it did this year in earning Emmy and SBJ award nominations). Forget talk of a “civil war,” especially if Santa Anita remains synthetic; there’s too much money and prestige at stake for the most recalcitrant owners and trainers to hold out for long. It will be a major change, but one with real potential for growing the game.
I don’t have much strong feeling about what the BC board seems on the verge of announcing, except on the matter of which track — and in that, they’ve made the right call, if Santa Anita is indeed their plan. There are many arguments for choosing Churchill, arguments not to be dismissed lightly. But, if Churchill Downs were to be named the permanent site, I’m certain that years from now we would look back in regret, pinpointing the decision as the moment the game became irrevocably marginalized, not only internationally, but within the US. Move the Breeders’ Cup to Louisville, and Churchill would become synecdoche for the two biggest events on the calendar, transforming racing from a national sport (niche as it may be) to a regional spectacle. No thanks, to that future. I’d rather see the Breeders’ Cup take a shot at global relevance and a mass audience in the glorious California sunshine.
Significant Support
8/20/09 Update: Much, much more on the Saratoga numbers, from Steve Zorn. “The Saratoga sale’s success masks some serious problems, and does nothing to address the weakness in the thoroughbred industry.”
How much did Sheikh Mohammed and the Maktoum family support the recently concluded Fasig-Tipton Saratoga select sale? By quite a bit more than acknowledged, according to Bill Oppenheim’s estimate in today’s TDN:
While no one seems to want to admit it publicly (they buy for “unnamed principals who don’t want to be identified,” or some such doubletalk), everybody knows a number of European trainers and agents are employed to sign for horses which end up racing for Maktoum entities. My entirely unofficial and unverifiable estimate is that seven other agents or trainers were signing tickets on their behalves, and their actual purchases consisted of about 37 yearlings totaling around $20.5 million in sales. That would represent 18 percent of the horses sent through the ring, and 39 percent of the money spent. I’ll bet that closer to the truth.
Perspective
In the midst of headlines about expensive yearlings and the optimism such babies inspire, Jeff Scott reminds readers,
that the vast majority of the most important races continue to be won by horses that didn’t cost a small fortune. For example, the 83 Grade I winners over the past 12 months included just four horses that sold commercially for more than $350,000 – one yearling and three juveniles.
Of 35 Grade I winners sold as yearlings, 20 were purchased for $85,000 or less. They included no less than seven champions (Curlin, Zenyatta, Big Brown, Wait a While, Forever Together, Midnight Lute and Stardom Bound), as well as Derby winner Mine That Bird, who brought all of $9,500 at Fasig-Tipton’s 2007 October yearling sale.
Odds and ends: “I was told he was drunk, had no credit, and had run away.” No, not Sheikh Mohammed, on the premises and good for $11.8 million, or 22.6% of the gross at the just concluded Fasig-Tipton select Saratoga sale, but an unknown bald man, who opened the bidding at $1 million for a Kingmambo filly then fled the pavilion after the hammer came down … Trying to interview the Sheikh? “Don’t bum rush” … Obligatory The Green Monkey mention.
A Fresh Perspective
Betfair USA president Gerard Cunningham, in an interview with DRF reporter Matt Hegarty, responding to a question about shifting wagering dollars and what TVG can do to attract new revenue and new fans:
I do want to comment on this idea of cannibalization, that online wagering has damaged handle at the racetrack. I actually don’t accept that premise. If I go back 10 years ago, before there was online wagering, and I move forward through the period, imagining that there was no Internet wagering on horse racing, then horse racing would still be competing against all of these other sports that are bringing in many, many more interactive entertainment experiences, and it would be competing with the sports that have remade their venues into very pleasant facilities, and with a whole new set of Internet wagering competitors, like online poker, which is a much cheaper bet than online horse racing, and you would have had this major change in the economy, in which we are all working a lot harder than we were a decade ago, where none of us have jobs for life anymore, and we do not have time to go to the track during the week. So if we didn’t have Internet wagering, the industry would be in much worse shape today. Internet account wagering has helped keep the wealthier, white-collar professional who has a busy job engaged with the sport during the week, and allowed him to participate in the sport as a bettor.
Links for 2009-07-17
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Betfair's smart approach to the US market, anticipating expansion, using TVG: "The technical team he is building in Silicon Valley is therefore taking a very modular approach to what its building online so that various components of online gambling can be turned on and off depending on the laws in individual states (or even countries). So that might mean poker and horseracing in one state, and sports betting in another."
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Search scanned DRFs from the 1890s through the 1980s. Partial resource, ongoing project, helpful to racing history buffs. (Via @colinsghost)
Night Numbers
By all accounts, Churchill Downs’ inaugural night of racing was a success: “It looks like the Dubai World Cup,” said jockey Julien Leparoux, surveying the crowd (Daily Racing Form); “We had to park and walk like it was Oaks or Derby day,” said an attendee (Paulick Report). The final attendance figure announced by Churchill was a healthy 28,011 for a card without a major stakes. But what about handle? As @superterrific noticed,
… all the reports of success don’t include handle …
Churchill no longer releases handle totals, but it is possible to glean clues about last night’s wagering from the pool data included on Equibase charts. For instance, on Friday, June 12, $1,966,831 was wagered WPS on 11 regularly scheduled races compared to the $2,309,563 that was wagered WPS yesterday on 11 nighttime races. That’s an increase of approximately 17% in the WPS pools week to week. In the late Pick 4 pool, $103,062 was wagered the previous Friday versus $137,689 last night, a 34% bump (the first Pick 4 pool was up 14%). Pick 3 pools totaled $273,409 compared to $243,508, up 12%. The tiny Pick 6 pool was up 80%, going from $4,811 last Friday to $8,653 last night. Total exacta pools showed some of the smallest growth, up a mere 6%, or $1,584,627 last night compared to $1,500,217 the week before.
Overall, not bad, considering the crowd skewed young and casual (Aside: Churchill took much criticism for raising the track entrance fee to $10, but clearly that didn’t keep people away and it surely made up for some of what many attendees didn’t — and wouldn’t have — bet). Looking at what information is available, it seems safe to conclude even without official figures that night racing was a win for handle as well as attendance.
Addendum: Curious about the totals, I returned to the charts and tallied all the pools for both dates. On June 12, total handle came to $5,872,007; on June 19, $6,526,603, an increase of 11%. Without figures from Churchill, it’s impossible to know the breakdown between on- and off-track wagering and whether on-track bettors wagered less per capita Friday night or how simulcast wagering might have been affected. Regarding the latter, it does seem likely the late post-times resulted in depressed off-track handle: The first three races on Friday night were the only races where pool totals didn’t exceed totals from the previous week. It was in race four, which had a post-time of 7:30 p.m., that wagering took off, with $704,666 wagered compared to $387,382 the week before. Take the first three races out of the totals for both days, and Churchill handle was up almost 18% for races four through eleven.
6/21/09 Update: The Courier-Journal reports that Churchill Downs took in $6.5 million from all sources (the same number I came to above), “a 32 percent increase.” Since the reporter earlier referenced 2008 numbers in discussing on-track numbers, I’m going to assume that this increase also represents a year to year comparison, not a week to week.
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Jessica Chapel is a writer and editor living in Cambridge, MA. Railbird v1 was a thoroughbred racing blog that ran 2004-2008; Railbird v2 is a broader collection of notes and links, but still (mostly) about the horses. More ›
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