Commentary : Racing in New York Continues to Decline

There was a time when horse racing in America could be divided into two tiers: New York, and everywhere else. Plenty of racing fans in Maryland can remember looking with constant envy on their counterparts in New York, who could go to Aqueduct amid crowds of 50,000 every Saturday and enjoy the sport at its best.

Of course, much has changed since New York’s golden years of the 1950s and 1960s. Off-track betting has caused a sharp decline in on-track attendance, and competition from other prosperous racing circuits has somewhat diluted the quality of the racing.

Even in view of these changes, though, an unwary visitor would be stunned at what he finds at Aqueduct nowadays: mediocre racing at a dirty, polluted physical plant populated by an ever-dwindling number of disgusted customers.

The racing program at Aqueduct Thursday, for example, includes four maiden races (three of them for New York-breds). The non-maiden races couldn’t attract more than nine horses, and the feature drew a field of five. Officials of the New York Racing Association readily acknowledge that the competition at the current meeting hasn’t been good, but say it is the result of temporary and unusual financial conditions.

“We were clobbered by the jockeys’ strike in the fall and our business took a dive,” said NYRA President Gerald McKeon. “We announced purse cuts of 15 percent in the winter meeting, and some of our larger stables decided to go to Florida. Our purses are back now, but the horses haven’t returned, and the cards are filled with cheap races. These last three months feel like they’ve lasted three years.”

For the poor bettors who have been spending day after day in Aqueduct’s grandstand, the last three months probably feel like three millenia. I was there for last Saturday’s Bay Shore Stakes and one day was plenty.

After hanging out in the clubhouse with some of my cronies for a few races, I began to notice that my throat was feeling raw and sore -- a familiar sensation, for Aqueduct customers are surrounded by smoky, stale air in that poorly ventilated enclosure. Handicapper Paul Cornman told me, “When I get home I have to change my clothes because they smell so badly from all the smoke. And it’s really not too bad today -- the temperature’s mild. When it gets to be 80 degrees outside, it feels like 100 in here.”

So I went outside to breathe some fresh air and sit with some friends in Section N of the grandstand -- and felt as if I’d wandered into a slum in the Bronx. The floors were filthy, and the whole area looked as if had been bombarded by bird excrement. When I observed that the area looked as if it had been cleaned for months, one disgruntled bettor said, “I don’t think they’ve cleaned it since the Breeders’ Cup.” That was November 1985. (McKeon insists that the track is “spanking clean before each day’s races,” but he must not have visited Section N lately.)

The regular racegoers here can cite a litany of complaints, from chaos in the parking lots to drug use in the stairwells, but what maddens the people here more than any specific inconvenience or indignity is the attitude behind them. Joe Cardello, a professional bettor, says, “Just every horseplayer I know feels that the New York Racing Association doesn’t care about its customers. Management takes the attitude that the hard-core bettors are going to come to the track regardless of how bad the conditions are.”

Maryland racing fans can feel pity and sympathy for their New York counterparts. When we tell the denizens of Aqueduct about the Sports Palace, about steadily rising attendance and purses at Laurel and Pimlico, about the tracks’ fan-oriented management, New Yorkers have every reason to be jealous of us.