Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy Asaro
Man you're a pain in the ass.
I passed on info I got from someone who would know. That's what they said. If you want some kind on intellectual debate call someone who would know more than I do. Preferable someone at Santa Anita or the TOC. Good luck
|
Contraction is almost never planned, in any business. Everyone hopes their business will succeed, everyone has plans to succeed, and everyone from shareholders to stakeholders push towards expansion or at least stasis. And when things go wrong, the tendency is (as we see in this very forum) to assume that there's something you can do to turn things around rather than to give up and say things have to close.
I literally realized soon after simulcasting was legalized that tons of tracks were going to close. If you had asked me back then if Hollywood or Arlington would have closed, I would have said no- so I'm not claiming clairvoyance here. But if you had asked me "will we lose Bay Meadows and Golden Gate?" or "will we lose Hialeah and Calder?" or "will we lose some of the California fair tracks?", I would have said "probably".
The basic economic problem is simple- for a small track, the betting handle absolutely depended on you not having anything better to bet on. Once it became possible to bet on the best races of the country at Saratoga and Churchill and the Gulfstream winter meet, why would anyone want to bet on their substandard local product.
And one easy way to see what is going on is to simply compare the number of people sitting in the grandstand watching races now to what you saw in the past. More and more people sit inside the grandstand and look at banks of televisions rather than in the stands watching the races. Why? Because they are betting on other tracks.
The economic model of the past was for every locality to have its own circuit of racing, supported by a cadre of local horsemen and a captive audience of bettors. The economic model of the future is for there to be a few supertracks that capture most of the country's betting handle, and for local tracks to decline and disappear.
And when you add on top of that reality the fact that tracks are often valuable tracts of real estate, the economics of closing tracks is just too obvious to ignore. My brother, who lives in San Francisco, points out that Bay Meadows and Golden Gate are the two largest pieces of land in the urban core Bay Area that will EVER, going forward, come into development. Hollywood Park, down in LA, is the biggest piece of real estate to come into development since Howard Hughes' plant, now called Playa Vista, was developed in the 1990's.
We are obviously a declining sport, but honestly, this would still be happening even if our sport was doing better. Once betting became a national market, it was obvious that it would be concentrated in a handful of tracks that produced the most bettable races. That is what has happened.
And California is in a particularly bad spot. We are far away from everyone so we can't benefit from horses vanning into our tracks (which helps a place like Oaklawn or the Texas or Maryland tracks a lot). Because the state is paradise on earth, we have high housing and labor costs- again, not a problem in the old days, but a problem now because we have to compete for horses and betting handle against places with lower housing and labor costs which can more easily be covered by purse money. We have some structural stuff in our Constitution that makes slot machines basically impossible at our tracks, and the types of casinos that are permissible are not profitable enough to prop up a racetrack. Plus, California is an animal rights hotbed and our tracks didn't help themselves when they went through a period where they killed a lot of horses.
Ultimately, we may lose the sport entirely or it may contract into a single boutique summer meeting at Del Mar, propped up by the fact that people will pay high prices to attend the races there during the summer.
But I would emphasize that all of this is somewhat separate from the long term health of the sport. If the sport got healthier, tracks would still be closing and racing would still be concentrating at a few super-tracks that can deliver high betting handle, high purses, and big fields.
Bottom line, if you have never been to Santa Anita and can afford it, you might want to come out soon and bask in its beauty. The long term prospects for California racing are bleak.
@
Glue Factory, I just need him to win, I could care less if he is running for $8cl or in a grade 1.
