I felt this needed to be said as a follow-up.
The sport of horse racing is stuck in nasty catch-22. Coverage in popular media (newspapers, general sports magazines, etc) is down significantly from what it once was to the point where it is all but nonexistent. I'm not saying this as a general longing for the good ol' days - I say this as someone who, long ago, learned about this sport while creating a gargantuan scrapbook of articles cut out of general newspapers. I wasn't able to subscribe to the likes of the Blood-Horse and Thoroughbred Record (as it was named in those days) until I was 16, years after I started my scrapbook. I would not have been able to create that scrapbook as a horse-crazy little kid today, because the material isn't there.
Newspapers and television are not obligated to carry coverage of anything, let alone coverage of a "sport" which is generally regarded, circa 2007, as one with limited mass appeal which mainly exists as a gambling vehicle. I have no doubt that legitimate readership/viewer surveys done by general media show horse racing as a marginal market. In short, if there aren't enough people who care, they're not going to waste the space/time covering our sport - but without coverage of horse racing in the general media, how are we going to attract new fans?
I don't have a clever answer.
But I have a suspicion that we're not going to get lasting new fans because of human interest stories about "little guy" connections who lucked into the horse of a lifetime and all-consuming obsession about the Triple Crown as if racing barely exists any other day of the year. That might hook a newbie into watching the Derby, but there needs to be a compelling reason to tune in for the Belmont even if the Derby winner lost the Preakness, or to look to see how so-and-so horse is doing now that it's July or August, or to tune in next year, even if last year's publicized "little guy" is back at Nowhere Downs with nothing but a couple of claimers.
I don't have anything against small, "feel-good" connections, but I am convinced that it is difficult for a newcomer to form a sustained attachment to the sport in the absence of any continuity and familiarity of the participants.
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