“On opening day, Queen’s Plate day, a few other days of the year, horse racing is a sport but the rest of the year we’re a gambling game.”
In Friday's Toronto Sun, Jamie Martin, senior vice-president for Woodbine Entertainment Group, talked indepth about horse racing with writer Bill Lankhof on a variety of topics that revolve around racing's role in our changing world.
“For a lot of people, we’re an opportunity to gamble. These days there’s lots of opportunities for people to gamble on lots of things. Go back a number of years and that wasn’t the case — that’s the advantage we’ve lost.”
Martin also offered his take on other issues facing harness racing:
On the live product and attendance: “We’re focused not so much in getting people to come to the track as giving them an opportunity to bet on our races. For people to take 4-5 hours out of their day to come here to the race track, people just aren’t going to do that anymore to the scale they used to.”
Turning slot players in horseplayers: “When we went into it, our hope was that we could generate horse-racing fans from people who came because of the slots. I’ll admit we probably had some success but it’s been limited. It’s two different games. One is a game of skill trying to pick a winning horse — slots is certainly not that.”
To read the full article, click here.
When it comes to people
When it comes to people taking 4-5 hours out their day to come to the track to watch the horses how about this. Shorten the time between races, warm ups are usually done on average seven to eight minutes, 10-12 minutes between races will cut on average an hour off each race card, and still gives time to study the program.
Start the races on time, when it is post time it is post time. People will bet and the big gamblers like last minute. They will still get thier money down on time wether you delay 30 seconds or on average 2 minutes as one track in particular north of Toronto is notorious for. I have noticed the drivers will call themselves to the starting gate at most tracks as the horses grow antsy waiting to go, this has also cost tracks money for having to refund a horse who got to wound waiting the extra time. There is another 30 to 40 minutes off the 4-5 hours. We are now down to 3.5-4 hours and it could be as low as 2.5-3. People will do this.
The track takeouts are now killing the sport. Greed kills, we are seeing this firsthand. Keeping times as listed above will also cut down on hours worked and therefore save tracks money. If you have the money to build a multimillion dollar paddocks and really want to have people show up, all tracks HAVE to decrease the takeot, I am sure you can decrease track takeouts, isn't this one of the reasons the slots were introduced.
The famous whipping rule. If we implement it they will come. Check the math, since this rule was implemented, handles have decreased instead of the upswing that was promised. This rule is good, don't get me wrong, but still needs to be re-tooled as the only comprimise has been lower handles and safety on the racetrack. I have never seen more lines dragging on the track than now so the drivers can use thier whips.
There you go, some resolutions to your issues, will they be looked at?,probably not. Will COSA or the OHHA stand to the forefront or better yet, try and get along and work together to resolve some of the issues and work with racetracks to get the public back to racing. Isn't this why these associations exist?. It has always been the same in racing, all for one and one for themselves, screw the other guy. Times have changed but the mindset of the people involved have not and the decline will continue.
By the way, we all see it coming, now is a good time to panic, or better yet, start working together to right the ship.
As always good luck and may the racing gods smile upon you.
Greg Parke
I'm not sure about Yonkers
I'm not sure about Yonkers statistics but I do know that DRF result charts for various thoroughbred tracks break down their handle into on track, state, interstate etc which would be easy to do as computers can easily break down this kind of information.
When are we going to hear
When are we going to hear people like Jamie Martin acknowledge that the excessive track takeout is also responsible for the declining wagers and killing any chance the game has of turning things around.
The article states: "Yonkers
The article states:
"Yonkers Raceway handles about $500,000 a night, with about $60,000 of it being bet at the harness track."
Here are the last 5 nights handle at Yonkers.
March 29th = $1,111,046. Mon.
March 30th = $1,055,126. Tues.
April 1st = $1,154,960. Thur.
April 2nd = $997,544. Fri.
April 3rd = $1,236,460. Sat.
B.t.w. this is what is bet on Yonkers and not other tracks and nowhere can you find out what the attendance is so how he ascertained that 60K was bet on track I do not know.