Saratoga
Wasn’t She Wonderful?
Superterrific, prepping the HRF Woodward Stakes Ten Things to Know feature in advance of Saturday’s race at Saratoga, sent me this reminder of Rachel Alexandra’s 2009 Woodward, a classic Ernie Munick video:
Picking up on the closing scene above:
The grandstand shook. We stood and roared for her. I’ll never forget.
He Was the Best
I’m heading up to Saratoga for the Whitney Handicap, which is a Breeders’ Cup Classic Challenge race and a stakes I best remember for 2006, the year Invasor won by digging in and outlasting Sun King by a nose. There is no Invasor in this year’s field, but the winner will get a guaranteed spot in this fall’s Classic, a race Invasor also won in 2006 at awesome odds of 7-1. If I’m missing, just a little, a horse retired more than four years ago, it’s probably because I recently wrote a profile of Invasor for Hello Race Fans, which includes several replays from his career, including — of course! — the Whitney.
Accommodations
It’s He Said, He Said round two with Paulick and DeRosa, and although I think Ed’s in the right and that in general, conversations about racing, marketing, and women are good to have, I also think that it’s a luxury to be in a position where all we’re talking about is a creepy-sexist Churchill Downs banner ad.
In the Saratogian on Saturday, Michael Veitch took NYRA to task for backing off earlier statements promising racino monies for backstretch housing:
Despite numerous statements by NYRA in recent years on the importance of improving living conditions at Saratoga as a first need, it now appears purse money and other improvements are more important….
With money finally available to help improve their living conditions, the association is going to back off previous assurances? You must be kidding.
I haven’t been in a Saratoga dorm since 2005, but it seems safe to assume conditions aren’t much changed. The buildings are probably still rundown and ill-maintained, and the women’s dorms probably aren’t much more comfortable or secure. In 2005, 15% of the available rooms on the Saratoga backstretch were allocated to female workers, even though female workers made up almost a third of backstretch labor. That meant overcrowding; every room in the women’s Clare Court dorm had 2-4 residents. I shared a 9×11 space with two others for six weeks. The room fit our beds and not much else.
That there wasn’t enough space wasn’t the only issue. The Clare Court dorm was also unsecured, and while residents could lock their individual rooms, they couldn’t lock the bathrooms or shower room. There were no locks on those doors, which opened, and were often left open, to hallways accessible to anyone who wandered in through the open front and back doors. And men did wander in. It wasn’t unusual to find one lurking just outside the bathroom or trying to peep into the shower room. This was — for some women — actually an improvement. Another stablehand told me that the situation was better at Saratoga than at Belmont, where men cut peepholes.
At least in the ad the guy with binoculars is looking at clothed women.
There is a problem with sexism in racing, and it’s not only in advertising, or the patronizing male attitudes Penny Chenery is depicted as overcoming in “Secretariat.” Female stablehands live and work with — as an anonymous hotwalker recently wrote — unwanted, and sometimes physical, attentions. They live with assaults on their privacy and dignity, and occasionally, on their persons. There’s a lot of “friendly banter” in the barns that isn’t so friendly — it’d be called sexual harassment almost anywhere else — and for women living in precarious backstretch housing, the talk is tinged with threat. As for why more women don’t speak up — the reasons range from a determination to be seen as tough and not a complainer, to not knowing where to go or who to talk to about what’s happening. And it’s complicated, as I commented elsewhere, by the fact that a significant number of female backstretch workers face challenges created by class and language, as well as gender.
I’d like to be more upset about Churchill’s banner, but I keep thinking about the anonymous hotwalker, and about women like her, the backstretch workers who will move into the shabby Clare Court dorm at Saratoga next summer and who will have to wonder who’s standing in the hallway while they shower.
Saratoga Spinning
The 2010 Saratoga meet closed on Monday and NYRA reported that, despite declines in on-track and all-sources handle and average daily attendance, figures exceeded expectations and even bucked industry trends:
Saratoga business outperformed the 7.3 percent decline in U.S. wagering year-to-date compared to 2009, and the 8.0 percent decline in wagering in August over the same month last year, as reported last Friday, September 3 by Equibase, the thoroughbred industry’s official statistics-gathering organization.
Except …
The raw economic figures for the industry, to which NYRA favorably compares Saratoga results, obscure positive trends. While wagering did decline 8.03% in August 2010 compared to August 2009, racedays declined further, by 13.23%. Average handle per raceday in August was actually up 5.6% ($1,985,538 over $1,873,229). Year over year, handle is stable, with wagering down 7.27% and racedays down 6.73%, yielding an average daily handle in 2010 that is off a mere .6% from 2009. Saratoga, however, ran 7.6% more races this year (see Dave Grening’s report in the Daily Racing Form on the Saratoga numbers), and its daily average all-sources handle was down 3.4%. Restrict the year-to-year numbers to the same 36 days, and things look a little better, with all-sources handle down 2.6% and races down 2.5%. Not bad, but not bucking.
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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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