[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by my miss storm cat

...because it's fun.

It adds another dimension, makes racing more user-friendly.

Racing needs bettors but it also needs fans and the people in between.

Enthusiasm.

I think it's a good thing, Kingie.

I know you know what some people here don't and that is that the fans DO play, that they DO bet, that they're the ones trying to bring more people in and get people excited... not the guys who - when they do actually go to the track - claim their spot inside, spread out the form, their laptop, whatever else and spend the day by themselves in a crowded place.

Yeah but they bet so little that it doesn't even register. Personally, I think it's a bad thing because it tends to get fans more intimately involved with the horses and creates a very unrational relationship between the horse and the fan. Look at the stuff those weirdos were saying on the Zenyatta website. Those people were crazy. People start looking at the horses as their friends and there becomes this emotional attachment that's unhealthy because then they forget that these are fragile properties and when one gets injured, as will always happen in this game, they start going to extremes with wanting to change rules and adopting measures, etc, that aren't realistic to what the sport is. This is a violent sport. Injuries happen. Horses break down and die. It happens. Havre de Grace isn't anyone's personal friend on here. If she's sold to a sheikh from Dubai or to some Japanese interests, so what. She is Porter's property, not ours. And she's replaceable. All of them are. Havre de Grace will be forgotten by year's end. If not sooner.