21st Century Racing Fans
Thursday night, I attended a book reading given by Kevin Smokler, editor of the recently published anthology, “Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times.” The collection was put together partially in response to a report released by the NEA in June 2004, “Reading at Risk,” that basically claimed America was turning into a country of illiterates. “America can no longer take active and engaged literacy for granted,” wrote NEA chairman Dana Gioia in the report’s introduction. If something wasn’t done, he warned, a “vast cultural impoverishment” was sure to result. TV, the Internet, and video games received most of the blame for the encroaching idiocy. But something about the report didn’t sit well with Smokler. Something was wrong:
It made me sad. But something beneath that disappointment stunk up the joint, double-talk that proclaimed us to be living in a new kind of nightmare for American literacy while blaming the same old bogeymen. If online reading was eating away at book reading, how did we explain literary weblogs that commanded thousands of readers a day … If young people were reading less than any other demographic group, how did we dismiss the revolution in young adult literature … or the best-selling careers of twenty-something favorites like David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, or Jonathan Safran Foer?
Racing reminds me of reading: both are frequently proclaimed dying. But what Smokler argues is that the “same old bogeymen” and, specifically, the Internet, aren’t killing reading. If anything, the Internet is changing the nature of reading and possibly, creating new readers. As he said in response to a question from the audience on Thursday, “Reading as the [NEA] report writers understand it is dying. Reading is not.”
It’s a bit harder to argue racing isn’t dying — declining attendance numbers can’t be quibbled with, and where racing once claimed 40% of the betting market, it now takes only 3% (Star-Telegram). Dwindling coverage in the mainstream print media doesn’t help, either. What the racing industry needs to realize though is that the Internet can save it. Okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic. But consider poker, as Steven Crist does in a new column:
The [World Series of Poker], which began in 1970 with a field of just 38 players, grew steadily through its first three decades, attracting 513 players by 2001. Then the numbers went through the roof: 631 in 2002, 839 in 2003, and 2,576 in 2004. This year, all but the final rounds of the event had to be moved from the traditional venue of Binion’s Horseshoe to the massive Rio Suites convention center to accommodate the 5,661 entrants who put up $10,000 apiece. (Daily Racing Form — sub. req.)
The growth can be largely attributed to the Internet. There are a couple of lessons racing can take from the poker’s success:
First, there is obviously a massive market of Americans interested in intelligent gambling, willing to read books, learn complicated rules, calculate odds, and bet accordingly. Second, the best way to reach those people and to facilitate that betting is through the Internet, which racing still embraces only awkwardly and tentatively.
“Awkwardly and tentatively.” That’s a nice way for Crist to put racing’s approach to the Internet.
Racing must recognize soon the power of the medium and figure out how to use it to the sport’s advantage. I’m talking about making more information easily available online (look at all the stats, summaries, and player biographies baseball provides on MLB.com), making it easier for new fans and the curious to find a way into playing the horses (this means going beyond just past performance chart tutorials and freeing the quantities of historic data hidden behind paywalls), and embracing blogs and RSS. As long-time observers keep saying, racing missed out on TV, and two generations later, the sport is paying the price in lost fans, particularly among the young. It can’t afford to do the same with the Internet.
I’ll be returning to this topic …
Introducing Standings
There’s a new feature on the main page: weekly standings, as calculated by Patrick of Pulling Hair and Betting Horses. Patrick came up with a simple ranking system for racing that assigns points to the top three finishers (and also-rans in specific instances) of graded stakes in nine different categories, with double points for Breeders’ Cup wins. Props to him for this welcome attempt at imposing objectivity and order on a sport that relies on the earnings list and a weekly racing media poll to determine its leaders, and for recruiting much of the racing blogosphere to post the standings.
7/5 Addition: The fractional points are due to three-year-olds taking on older horses or fillies and mares taking on the boys, with 1.25X for the former, and 1.5X for the latter.
The points system:
| G1 | G2 | G3 | 3YOs | BC | |
| 1st | 120 | 55 | 15 | 180 | 240 |
| 2nd | 80 | 40 | 10 | 80 | 160 |
| 3rd | 60 | 30 | 5 | 60 | 120 |
| Also-ran | 35 | 10 | 0 | 35 | 0 |
Gloom and Doom
Is there something in the air? Pessimism regarding racing’s future seems to be everywhere lately. John Pricci is “filled with dread” and angry that politics and moralizing do-gooders are imperiling the sport, which:
… is being assailed on all sides, from the politically expedient to an indifferent mainstream press, from an issues-challenged industry media to the backstretch cheats. Racing is a state’s-rights-oriented industry that avoids when possible the mechanisms for policing itself on a national level. (MSNBC)
Nick Canepa isn’t feeling too cheery about the state of racing either:
Horse racing as we have known it appears to be slowly heading down the stretch. The once magnificent Sport of Kings is in danger of becoming the mundane sport of serfs — or slots. (San Diego Union-Tribune)
And then there’s this from Scott Van Voorhis:
Without Las Vegas-style slot machines, horse racing appears to be an endangered species. (Boston Herald)
The Herald article has what is possibly the most unsympathetic to racing quote I’ve seen anywhere:
William Thompson, a professor and gambling expert at the University of Las Vegas, contends the sport is dying and should be left to wither on its own.
If lawmakers feel they need to give one-armed bandits to racetracks to keep them alive, why not grant slot machines to struggling auto makers or dying steel mills?
“We are failing, therefore give us gaming. It’s an absurd argument,” Thompson argued.
“Free enterprise means the freedom to succeed and fail. Failure is extremely important. People take money out of failed enterprises and shift it to enterprises that work.”
Professor Thompson is obviously not a racing fan.
Certainly some of this pessimism is warranted. The latest numbers on handle from California and New York, for instance, aren’t good. Wagering is down more than 4% across California this year, and handle was down 15% for Aqueduct’s winter/spring meet (Blood-Horse). Alan at Left at the Gate discusses NYRA’s dropping handle, and points out that the concomitant 18% decline in attendance is particularly ominous.
Suffolk won’t announce any figures on attendance and handle until the end of the meet, but I won’t be surprised if there’s a 5-10% decline. Bad weather dogged the first four weeks of racing and there’s no MassCap this year. Yesterday, however, was a lovely day — the sun finally came out, the temperature was in the low 70s, and a small crowd of about 4,000 was at Suffolk. My racing companion and his sister came out with me and we sat in the box seats overlooking the paddock and the finish line, watching the horses and cashing an occasional ticket, happily whiling away the afternoon. It was the sort of lazy early summer day at the track that makes all the bad news about racing seem impossible.
Neophyte Learns Racing Secret
Play hunches. Better yet, drop the slavish devotion to playing favorites. (SF Weekly)
Proud Railbird, Meaningful Cog
“I’m a railbird, proud of it. I’m proud to be a meaningful cog in the mesmerizing circus that gathers around the thoroughbred racehorse. The hours spent trackside, win or lose, are a pleasure that makes the mad calliope of daily life bearable.” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
To Disclose or Not to Disclose
I’m repeating myself, reposting this Bill Finley ESPN column, but I wanted to say a little more about the issue of disclosure. What Finley writes, in the wake of the Sweet Catomine affair and owner Marty Wygod’s CHRB hearing, is that when it comes to the public getting information on a horse’s condition,
there has to be a better system in place than the one we have now, which is, basically, the public can be damned. At the very least, when a horse undergoes any kind of surgical procedure or is shipped to a veterinary clinic for treatment, which is where Sweet Catomine spent about 40 hours the week of the Santa Anita Derby, that information should be disclosed. Has a horse missed any serious training time of late? Have there been any serious infirmities since its last race? The betting public has a right to know.
This seems like a very reasonable position to me. If a horse has a myectomy or is treated for a bleeding episode between starts, that should be made known. Really, how different is disclosing this information from the disclosure bettors get now that a horse is on Lasix for the first time? Or that it’s wearing different shoes than previously reported? Or carrying x number of excess pounds?
Hank Wesch take a contrary stance in the Union-Tribune:
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, with much potential to mislead. And disclosure can be a double-edged sword with the capability of cutting anyone….
Two days before the 1990 Preakness, Kentucky Derby runner-up Summer Squall was observed bleeding from the nostrils while being grazed in the grassy area adjacent to the Pimlico stakes barn. Come race day, the little colt performed superbly and turned the tables on Kentucky Derby winner Unbridled.
In such instances, disclosure would have meant many bettors going to other horses and coming away with the feeling they’d fallen prey to a disinformation campaign designed to boost the odds on the winner they failed to have.
I don’t buy this argument — it ignores the fact that bettors already feel cheated by nondisclosure, and it’s patronizing. If anything, I’d expect bettors to feel less cheated if they were given such information and could incorporate it (or not, depending on their preference) into their handicapping, so long as clear guidelines for what should be disclosed were established and the information was reported consistently.
The Real Thing
“Graphic, high-quality replications of pounding horses and photo finishes at the virtual victory line amounts to a slur on Secretariat and his progeny — not to mention on the young father I quietly watched juggling his good fortunes with a tot-filled stroller at one hand and a heavily marked tout sheet in the other.
“Up from a similar gambler’s bloodline, I had $10 on Dr. Rockett to win in the third at a mile and an eighth. Leading desperately down the stretch, my horse was suddenly bumped off stride by a wayward competitor, Exaggerate This, who flashed across the finish line as the unofficial winner by a nose. Assorted hoots, groans and vulgarities rose up toward the jetliner traffic from Kennedy.
“No way virtual racing could match the scene: sunshine-drenched anxiety, replays of my bumped horse on the infield screens, the wait for an official result with serious money and sweating thoroughbreds on the line.” (New York Times)
The Information Game
Rupert Murdoch may not be the man you think of when the subject of reforming racing comes up, but his speech last Wednesday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors is spot on in describing the technological-cultural shifts of the past decade, and what he has to say about the need to reach young people on their terms if a tradition-bound industry is to survive is as relevant to racing as it is to journalism:
We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from….
What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel….
In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation….
Where four out of every five americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse….
The trends are against us…. Unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans.
Gray Areas
“To be a horse-racing fan means accepting that along with the occasional true hero and clear-cut villain comes a barn full of men and women whose true character is impossible to discern.” (LA Daily News)
A Number of Challenges
That’s what racing faces in 2005, reports Bill Christine, in a lengthy article that recounts the woes of NYRA, Magna, and Churchill Downs in recent months. Federal investigations, operating losses, and tussles with the Jockeys’ Guild all made 2004 difficult for the three organizations that own some of the best tracks in the United States, and there’s no sign that the problems will go away this year, weakening the entire industry: “Racing, racked by empty seats and competition from other forms of gambling, is struggling because its strongest links are not that strong.” (LA Times)
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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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