Way back when it was the only legal gambling in town and you had to go in person.
A generation came along in the 60's and 70's who didn't have interest, rejected tradition of which racing was a part. The sport started to die.
By the time a generation came along that might have been enticed back into the sport, casinos exploded all over the landscape and offered nonstop action which required no special skill or effort, e.g. reading a form. Meantime the sport developed numerous bad habits, symptoms of it's decline if you will.
The sport now is in permanent decline. It's a snake eating it's own tail and which will eventually disappear.
It is fractured, crooked, drug-sated, antiquated, an ever- diminishing pie over which a set of greedy parasites squabble. These feudal barons of racing bleed their customers dry while finding new ways each month to withhold their tattered product from their last few remaining degenerate gambling customers.
If you wrote this up as a Hollywood movie it would not sell due to the absurdity of it - unless you created a racing Superman who flew in from planet Kryptonite and fixed everything and killed Lex Luthor, except in this film it would be Frank Stronich and Drew Cuoto's bastard radioactive love-child, instead of Lex.
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