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Paying for Housing

I lived in one of the backstretch dorms at Saratoga last summer, sharing a 9 x 11 room with two other women. We kept our cramped room tidy — there wasn’t enough space for anyone to get messy — but the common areas of the dorm quickly fell into filth. Muddy puddles stagnated in the moldy shower room. Trash overflowed the too small buckets placed in the bathrooms, and the toilets clogged so often that people threw their used tissue into stall corners rather than risk flushing (until the cleaning crew started leaving a plastic bag in the corner, which made the situation slightly more tolerable). The cleaning staff came intermittently — there were times they would come two or three days in a row and then then they wouldn’t come for another three or four days. The women’s dorm was also unsecured, and it wasn’t unusual to step out of the bathroom and find a man lurking in the hall.

Unfortunately, those unclean and unsafe conditions aren’t limited to the Saratoga backstretch. So, that Barbaro’s owner Gretchen Jackson is even bringing the issue up is a good thing — backstretch workers deserve safe, well-maintained housing — but Jackson is very, very wrong about who should be reaching into their wallets to pay for this housing:

“This needs to be brought out, not with the wagging of fingers at people, but more like, ‘Look what’s happening,’ ” Jackson said. “If everybody who went to the track reached in their wallet and spared five dollars instead of placing a bet and put it in for new living quarters for grooms.”

Why should bettors, who already provide for little things like purses by wagering, donate to the cause of better backstretch housing? While I’m sure many would if appealed to, housing really isn’t their concern. Those who most directly benefit from the cheap labor provided by backstretch workers — owners, trainers, and tracks — are the ones who should be reaching into their wallets and sparing some money for decent accommodations. And there should be finger wagging, lots of finger wagging: Racetrack executives should be ashamed of the barely habitable living conditions offered on many backstretches, and trainers and owners should be ashamed that the hotwalkers and grooms who labor seven days a week year round caring for their animals often live worse than those animals.

Jackson, much to her credit, has been using her recent media prominence to speak up about some of the darker issues that haunt racing — not just backstretch conditions, but horse slaughter.

Posted in Track Notes on June 11, 2006

Quiet, and Kind of Creepy

In other words, a typical weekday at the track:

I went out to Bay Meadows recently — my first visit to a track in years, I admit — and things were so sedate I thought I’d lost my hearing. Most bets are placed at electronic touch screens now, so there were no wishful last words or giddy collection scenes at the windows, no general clamor or charge. It was more like some horse-theme mall, with gift shops and ATMs. What I took to be Bay Meadows habitues were seated at long tables near a vacant bar in isolated cones of silence, like men at an old porno movie house, their glazed eyes trained on banks of television screens that relayed the labors of horses at distant tracks — Hollywood Park, Belmont, Churchill Downs.

Posted in Track Notes on May 31, 2006

The Rock Turns 100

Rockingham Park

Rockingham Park opened for its 100th season on Saturday in front of a crowd of 4,185. Driver Mike MacDonald started off the year with a bang, winning five races, including the day’s feature with Whosurboy, who set a track record of 1:49 in the one mile Invitational Pace. The New Hampshire track, which opened in 1906 with a 21-day thoroughbred meet, will run a 60-day harness meet this year.

Related: “Happy 100th, Rockingham Park. May you enjoy as many more birthdays as time and the economy allows, and may racing fans come to the track this summer to take part in your celebration.”

In other New England racing news: Mom’s Command, jockey Carl Gambardella, and late Rockingham owner Lou Smith will be inducted into the New England Turf Writers’ Association Hall of Fame this summer.

Posted in Track Notes on May 27, 2006

Attendance Is So Passé

“We’re moving toward becoming a handle-driven track rather than an attendance-driven one,” said outgoing Gulfstream president Scott Savin, contrasting the current mindset with the pre-construction period when free weekend concerts drew crowds of nearly 30,000. “We think you’re better off taking good care of 12,000 people rather than struggling to deal with 25,000.”

Posted in Track Notes on May 16, 2006

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