Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy Asaro
Racing in the north won't work anymore. They'd have extremely small fields plus fair takeout rates which are much higher than Golden Gate takeout.
This threat was easy to see coming. As it is I doubt Santa Anita has long to go either.
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I didn't want to say this, but this is right.
Look, we're most likely not going to have racing in California in a few years, except maybe Del Mar and perhaps a fair meet or two. The economics don't work anymore.
But if we ARE to save racing in California, if it is saveable, we can only have one circuit. I would have preferred that this would have included northern California, and that we had done this when Hollywood Park closed, with a return to the pre-1960's single circuit where we move between the South and the North. But the horsemen threw a temper tantrum so we got a Los Al meet nobody wanted instead.
So it's either we let Santa Anita have its chance to consolidate everything in Southern California along with Del Mar, or we close Santa Anita and just go into the death spiral.
EDIT: And BTW, this is mostly a problem of costs (our labor costs are HUGE) and geography (we have to basically operate on our own island because we are so far away from any other major racing circuit, whereas New York benefits from being interconnected with Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc.). It's not because we are a lefty state (although in the LONG TERM, there's a possibility that we ban horse racing because of our politics).
