Op/Ed

Amid the slumping economy, the empty grandstands and the tumbling bottom line, it's sometimes easy to forget that horse racing can be pretty special, even rather popular. Jeff Gural remembers. He came into the sport of harness racing during its golden era, when the stands were packed at Yonkers and Roosevelt Raceways and a driver, Carmine Abbatiello, had his own beer commercial. Whether it's harness or Thoroughbred racing, Gural isn't convinced that the sport can't climb its way back and do so without a crutch called slot machines.

Yesterday, the American Graded Stakes Committee announced their official upgrades and downgrades. I'm sure, if you looked carefully enough, you could make plenty of arguments about races that were rewarded for their importance and races that were penalized for their loss of impact. However, there is certainly one race that sticks out amongst them all. The committee decided that the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf, for colts, was worthy of a promotion from Grade II to a Grade I. I wholeheartedly agree and applaud this move upward. However, the female counterpart...

If there is a document or report in the Thoroughbred industry that is cited or mentioned more often than the "McKinsey Report," I am not aware of it. Almost any discussion of drugs and medication in our sport eventually leads back to a mention of that seminal report of 1991.

Why stud fees need to be slashed. A few stud fees for 2011 have already been announced, and so far it looks like business as usual, even though business as usual is a disaster. We cannot ignore the math and go forward with "blinkers on" when the best thing that can be said about this year's horse market is that it is not in free fall compared to the previous year. We have not yet found bottom. Meanwhile, farm owners in Kentucky continue to go out of business on a...

In recent years, all three of the foundation pillars that support our industry--bettors, racetracks, and owners, have been crumbling. Our old reliable bettors are aging, pulling back or are moving to other games. Our racetracks are under siege and many, even in big critical growth markets, are seemingly in danger of failure. And our racehorse owners have been reducing their stables, with some exiting our sport completely, or going on hiatus.

A deepening crisis. Two years ago, I wrote that our American breeding industry's chief service providers (stallion owners, sale companies, and veterinarians) needed to be proactive and reduce their fees 50% to address an emerging crisis in breeder profitability. I pointed out that as breeders disappear, there will be fewer and fewer horsemen and horses to “service,” and revenues for all groups will decline, even after the general economy regained strength. In other words, I argued that it is actually in the best interest of service providers to work with...

Have you ever wondered why Humpty Dumpty had his great fall, and why he could never be put back together again, even by all the Kings' horses and all the Kings' men? What happened? Humpty Dumpty started using drugs; in fact, drugs permeated his entire realm, the Sport of Kings. Humpty Dumpty also began a long and cozy association with shady characters and thugs...all types, like rogue gamblers, race fixers, and trainers who used Cobra venom or who had multiple drug convictions and yet still continued to ply their trade.

Just imagine a National Football League where every state had slightly different rules, perhaps nine-yard first downs when you play in Illinois and 11-yard first downs for games in Ohio. Imagine the NCAA basketball tournament if each of the eight "sweet 16" games were played on randomly different dates because the four host arenas could not agree on a coordinated schedule. And what if we could not watch all of those games on nationwide TV, because each arena had negotiated its own unique TV contract?

It has been another week of gloom (Turfway scraps Kentucky Cup) and doom (wagering off $519 million through first half of 2010) and more gloom (Hollywood cancels another card) and more doom (Mace Siegel throws racing leaders under bus). It gets a little tiresome, especially when the solution should be obvious to anyone who understands the most elementary economics, and yet the industry doesn't do what needs to be done.

As Tim Capps wrote in his recent Op/Ed, "people who love racing in America … are more concerned about its health, well-being and, above all future, than at any time in the writer's increasingly lengthy memory." Concern, however, is not enough. We need active love.

For regular readers of Thoroughbred Daily News, it has become customary to read opinion pieces written by racing industry participants of all stripes on what they see as the state of things in the sport, most of them laced with elements of frustration, fear, anger, wishing and hoping: "please, please, please: someone take charge and get us out of this mess."

There were several news items that appeared recently in this publication that I found thought-provoking. The first was the article on John Fulton and the opportunities he is taking advantage of in Argentina. The second was the news that the NTRA had launched a virtual reality game based on different aspects associated with our sport and industry. The third was the continued excellent coverage of the current Monmouth Park meet.