The Importance of Being Audacious
“It’s a crap shoot. Nothing more, nothing less. Ship your horse thousands of miles, take a deep breath and roll the dice. You never know: you might beat three, as did Nebraska Tornado on Saturday; just one, as did Mona Lisa; or none at all, the fate of Scandinavia. Or you could end up beating them all. Just like Wilko…. Wilko’s triumph was one for opportunism at the expense of cold logic. It was a triumph for the have-a-go attitude that increasingly deserts those who campaign horses.” (Times)
Memories
Kevin Modesti laments the growing respectability of horseracing. “The National Thoroughbred Racing Association has announced that the sixth annual national handicapping tournament in Las Vegas in January will be televised on ESPN. The goal, obviously, is to bring horseplayers, with their speed figures and their hot tips and their hunches, out of the shadows. To take the game of picking winners and make it kind of acceptable. Well, where’s the fun in that? Oh for the bad old days.” (LA Daily News)
Watching the Workouts
“But determination matters more than time. And determination’s often visible, right there on the track, even through the dimness and over the distinct sounds that can seem unmoored — yes, it’s visible right there in the turn, where the horse moves smoothly and evenly as if gliding, like a sprite or perhaps some kelpie, curving with the track and then bursting into the stretch, reaching for real estate and then reaching for the wire but ultimately reaching for something more, something essential, something that must be, because it can’t be anything else, self-definition.” (Dallas Morning News)
He Got It
Outgoing NYRA Chairman Barry Schwartz got racing: “The co-founder and former CEO of Calvin Klein not only grasps the sport from the rarified perspective of breeder and owner of racehorses, but he also understands the horseplayer, because he shares that passion, too. He supports rebates, can read the sheets and can put together a Pick 6 ticket.” ‘Tis a shame that his administration, which began with such promise, writes Paul Moran, was distracted by the mess NYRA found itself in. (Newsday)
Racing Needs Celebrities
Like Smarty Jones, says marketing guru Laura Ries: “You need those celebrities out there. What would happen to football if Brett Favre retired at age 21? What would happen to baseball if Barry Bonds retired at age 21? … Keep the horses on the track and out of the breeding sheds.” More advice from Ries: Forget about slots. “Why put slot machines at racetracks and educate your customers to patronize the enemy?” (Blood-Horse)
Related: “Van Clief says NTRA could make changes in advertising” (Thoroughbred Times)
Good News
“Horse racing continues to gain ground in popularity and measures up very well compared with other major league sports, according to the latest information from the ESPN Sports Poll. The horse racing fan base among the United States population ages 18 and older went 31.4% in 1999 to 37.7% for the first seven months of 2004, according to the data.” Plus: “The number of avid fans overall increased 38% from 2002-2004…. 48 million Americans indicated they are interested in going to the races. That number is up from 34.8 million in a 2003 survey.” (Blood-Horse)
A Cynical Take
On the relations between fans and racing executives: “Go to any racetrack in America and you will hear the same weary complaints. The programs are too expensive, the food is lousy, the service is worse, the tellers are surly, the fields are too short, the horses aren’t any good … and why in God’s name do they persist in charging people to get in?
“When you raise your voice, the people who run the joint dismiss you as a loser, the thinking being that if you cashed a ticket every now and then you wouldn’t be so bitter, the implication being that you must not be very bright and that you’ll be back anyway because you’re hopelessly hooked on the game.
“This is all in the manual, the racing executive’s guide on how to make friends and influence people. They’re very smart people, these racing executives, which would explain why horse racing is flourishing the way it is.” (Ashbury Park Press)
A Genuine Horseplayer
“Gerry Ahnstrom is a horseplayer. Eighty-one years young, she has attended the racetrack with ferocious regularity for more than 70 years.” And don’t interrupt her when she’s handicapping, writes Larry Lee Palmer. “Years ago, I made the mistake of bugging her as she was perusing an upcoming race…. Without taking her eye off the Form, she said tersely, ‘Can’t you see I’m trying to play the races?’ I slunk away feeling like a mouse knee-deep in Cheez Whiz.” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
Attendance Obsession “Silly”
As usual, Steven Crist is right. “The obsession with attendance is more than a silly deception. It encourages tracks to concoct … schemes to pump up their gate numbers, distracting focus and resources from meaningful improvements that might someday have a legitimate effect on true interest and participation.” (Daily Racing Form)
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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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