Racing will never be able to stand on its own without significant govt intervention. I told you this 2 years ago and it is more true now than ever.

You have interests hostile to racing operating tracks! You have competition from casinos everywhere. You have govt's bending over backwards to help casino intersts (see Revel in NJ) while actively working against racing.

There will be no racing without help anywhere. It is getting hard to convince people to breed and own horses at the current purse and breeding incentive levels. What do you think you will see with reductions? Contracting industries generally continue to contract till they are no longer relevant.

Yeah I'm sure that they can stimulate a couple billion dollars worth of handle in PA with online betting.

How did they survive before he slots, or did they just open? I dont follow that circuit.......at all.

True horse racing isnt a necessary item. However when combined with casino gambling it does at least create positive benefits other than simple tax revenue especially considering that we are approaching saturation levels with casinos, at least in the East.

Keep in mind Chuck, I have as much of an interest in racing succeeding as you do, and more interest in seeing as many tracks open as possible.

The business model for racing sucks. Costs are way too high for bettors and horsemen alike. Putting on the show could cost a whole lot less than it does now. But you are right, the tracks will die without subsidies. It was blown a long time ago when simulcasting models were implemented, and later when it was carried over to allow third parties to run ADWs and siphon off tons of money.

The whole thing needs to be blown up. There would be a lot of pain involved, but really I don't see any other way. We keep applying patches to a broken game, and eventually it will just die.

Racing can not compete with casino gambling for obvious reasons especially when that casino is placed in direct competition right on top of the racing facility. This was a pretty clear reason why racing was granted these monies in the first place. Surely life will go on in area's where tracks no longer exist but there is without a doubt a economic impact that racing provides that casinos certainly do not.

Even if in states like PA if things had been done in an ideal manner the amount of growth would never keep pace with the amount of money coming from our "partners" in the casino. Lets not forget that the ONLY reason that Parx and Penn have casinos is they were established racing facilities. Now big boys realize that sentiment only lasts so long when so much money is in play but facts are facts.

They were hardly thriving but they had no competition outside of AC before Delaware Park came online. Once that happened they had to get slots or probably close up shop. If you went back to a 1990 world prior to any casinos outside of Vegas and AC, racing might have a chance to turn things around w/o alternate sources of funding. However in the 2014 world that just isnt true.

I may be naive but I dont see people deciding "do I play the ponies or do I play the slots today".......I feel like people seek out poker to play, they seek out horses, or they seek out whatever venture that they enjoy and can survive.

You just have little chance of surviving long term in horse racing. When that changes, if ever, I feel like the sport could grow.

Those in the industry would rather we just look at it as entertainment.

While your assessment is really spot on I just dont see how it is possible.

I have a lot of experience in racing. I worked as a groom as a kid in Saratoga before I was legal to work. Worked in the parking lot at night at Saratoga harness. I went to the U of AZ race track program. I spent 2 years as asst racing secretary at Yonkers. I have moonlighted charting races and punching tickets at various times. I worked for some of the top trainers in the US and have trained, owned and bred horses on my own since 1999. I have been thinking about how to fix the game for 25 years and sadly the more experience in different area's that I got, the more I realized that racing was essentially doomed.

You will never get "racing" to act as a single entity despite the clamor for a commissioner or league office of sorts. There are few businesses in the world where so many different working parts work together while serving different masters with different goals in mind. Self interest is simply too strong of a human flaw to overcome. There are a lot of people who are making a lot of money as racing is currently constructed an despite an awareness that things NEED to change many feel they will just ride it out to the end squeezing every penny they can get before the end comes.

There has been a sense of doom surrounding this business for 100 years if you read the old thoroughbred record news reports from the past so you have to understand that a lot of racing people continue to see it as crying wolf even as Hollywood Park closes and Bay Meadows closes and we have Penn National gaming building "tracks" with zero live mutual clerks. The Feds carted off a couple of trainers on trumped up charges of race fixing yet miracle workers in other area's are still working magic. This is a vision less industry with short term considerations a virtual given.

I see exchage wagering as a potential revelation of sorts but the industry will surely screw it up. At the very least Monmouth has a few guys willing to try different things like sports betting and exchange wagering. Though I suppose once sports betting gets humming the state will surely take it away like they do with slots money right?

I guess when it comes right down to it I know far too may of the industry movers and shakers to have any confidence that they can solve virtually any mundane issue let alone a massive overhaul. I'm old enough to ride it out till the end but anyone who is young and interested in the sport, go to Pat Cummings for advice because the game in this country is in far worse shape than most even realize.

You are thinking too specifically. Gambling is gambling and the proliferation of the availability of casino gambling more or less is choking off many of the potential players of the past.

Funny thing is that your thinking is similar to the reasoning that started racing down the path it has taken. NYRA thought that no one would go to OTB's and not to the tracks in the early 70's. No one thought that the lotteries would hurt handle. Tracks and horsemen didnt think that people would stop betting live races to bet simulcasts in the 90's.

In the end we cant go back and fix those mistakes because in each case the cat is out of the bag and cant be put back in. So yeah we should be using the slot money in a more efficient manner, we should have used more money to try to grow handle and we should have spent more on marketing and lobbyists. But as you have implied as long as the states are needing new revenue sources the slot money will always be in danger.

I hope you are wrong, but I'm not optimistic.

Given the dynamics probably the correct approach?

Not really working, so no. Race betting doesn't draw the type of person that bets lotteries or slots machines. It draws people that like a challenge. The people that are going to bet enough money to matter aren't doing it for entertainment, and they aren't doing it as an aside to watching horses running around in a circle.

Caught only a smidge of the live Friday radio programs first few minutes and didn't quite know what Steve was so fired up about.

This is does not look good for the racing industry.

It is so sad that the public will be misled because to find the truth is going to take some digging; the press is failing at adequately informing the public.

Its a bit of a different discussion for a different place I suppose.

Pa horse board commission or whatever was scheduled to be bankrupt this year according to an article I read a few months back...supposed to fold into the pa gaming commission

Since I got called into the fray...

1. Most horses are born with the instinct to run and compete, no matter where they are born.

2. All horses eat, drink, excrete, sleep, etc. Almost every horse the world over has an owner, and if it is in their interest to keep the horse (for whatever reason), they have to spend resources to maintain the horse. THIS is a massive, and (especially amongst some) wildly under-recognized economic driver. Keep it in mind.

3. Philly.com did a hit piece on racing a few months back, which seems just a prelude to this recent attack. I call it a hit piece because it was, pure and simple. It suggested, and I am not stretching the suggestion, that old ladies were spending their social security checks through penny slots to enrich Saudi princes, and financiers like George Bolton/Paul Reddam, etc, and that was wrong.

4. Here's the original story, from September. It's almost as if this most recent effort to raid racing's "coffers" is a function of someone reading this story. More likely, I'd suggest, it's all part of the same campaign. Read it here - http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Gi..._industry.html

5. It was (and remains) economic sensationalism at its worst, framing the entire industry around the person who owns the horse, with absolutely no reference to the fact that this is the person who also pays the bills, and that trickle down is substantial. The more horses you have, the wider your reach, the MORE people who are paid (read also - the more economic stimulus the sport, essentially the horse, provides to society).

6. Watch this video, the whole thing isn't required, from 2:00 to 4:00. This is Mick Goss, a phenomenal fellow who runs Summerhill Stud in South Africa. Never in my history in the sport have I encountered someone who captured the trickle-down economics of racing any better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuwH19fQOCI

"I've always been amazed by the tenacity of our horsemen. We have colleagues who have been known to mortgage their farms in order to pay their stallion fees...

"If racing were simply commerce, Karl Marx should have been its interpreter. As a financial proposition, it is about the redistribution of incomes. It is socialism in a form so subtle you'd hardly notice it. Hundreds of millions of rands (South African $$) are supplied each year by businessmen from Massachusetts to Mooi River, from surgeons and solicitors, gold miners to merchant bankers, and tax avoiders from all over.

The treasure they contribute is then redistributed slowly, little by little each month so it doesn't look too obvious. To jockeys, trainers, vets and farriers, to clairvoyants, chiropractors, and grooms, to bottlers of magic elixirs, feed merchants and float drivers. Eventually, the working class has acquired most of the surplus income of the bourgeois.

When the cycle begins, the horsepeople provide the experience, the owners the cash. When the cycle is complete, the horsepeople have the cash, and the owners have the experience."

7. If the Rep. thinks the sport exists to enrich those who already are a little more, he needs an economics lesson. How good is racing's rebuttal to all of this? We'll see.

8. If anyone wants a look at what racing could become without competitive assistance racinos have provided, take a good look at the purse structure in the UK. To suggest it's terrible is an understatement. Racing in the UK is almost exclusively in the domain of the incredibly wealthy, because there is almost no way to make money. Ryan Goldberg did a great story on this for the International Herald Tribune last year. US racing has done a phenomenal job of making the game significantly affordable for more than just the uber elite.

That's all I have for now.

Governor Tom Corbett is supposed to address increasing spending on education in Pennsylvania today. I hope he doesn't tie his remarks to the proposed raiding of the horse racing revenue or this could get a lot more dire in a hurry. :(

This lunacy has also spread to Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/taxanaly...s-or-children/