You would think that with the average Saturday at Belmont getting 50,000 people, it would be really simple to handle double the crowd once every few years.
Or not.
They better expand that press box to keep the savages from killing each other because they just can't hold as many writers as they should. Tables were stacked tighter than anything I'd seen before. And there was at least almost one fight that I witnessed...cooler heads prevailed (all sarcasm aside - this really happened).
It's worth noting that the same crowding you may have experienced in some parts of the track was similar to some in the press box.
I get it - we want people to have the best experience possible at the races. What would everyone have been saying if California Chrome had won and they still had to deal with these issues? 100,000 on site, but revisionist history would have 300,000 saying they were there to witness it (and happily deal with the headaches).
If NYRA makes wholesale changes to refurb Belmont to be able to better handle a Triple Crown chance - guess what - the full exec team should be fired.
Surely, there are small things that could be done to increase some comforts, but whining about a singular experience is like being in the middle of a forest and standing right in front of one tree and complaining about the fact that this single tree is in your way. Step back and look at the big picture and just think about it all for a few minutes.
As the progressive racing entrepreneur Andrew Rideout @thoroughbredAR tweeted this weekend -
"Nobody comes racing. Empty grandstands. The sport is dying"
"Too many people here. OMG. Stop everything. The sport is dying"
See a pattern?
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