Business
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 writes and edits in Massachusetts. Railbird is a Thoroughbred horse racing blog published from June 2004 to July 2019. More / Contact
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