N.Y. Tracks Require Better Class of Horse to Bring Back Bettors

An hour before post time on a sunny, cool midweek afternoon at Belmont Park, the fans are none-deep at the clubhouse admission gates. Vendors of programs, tip sheets and racing papers, interrupted only occasionally by customers, chat among themselves. The tomblike quiet of Belmont’s vast lobby goes directly and chillingly to the bone.

The horseplayers have fled to the off-track betting shops and simulcast facilities. Their migration is well-documented and the New York Racing Assn. is at a loss to win them back. The reasons are myriad: inept management; downward spiraling parimutuel taxes; the declining quality and increasing danger of public transportation; ludicrous marketing; discourteous help at every turn; expansion of simulcasting; the rise of lotteries and nearby casinos; the softening economy; the self-defeating practice of the six-day racing week and the year-round season . . . just to scratch the surface. The race track is left to the hard-core horseplayers, and their number shrinks steadily from year to year.

Astonishingly, fewer than 14,000 were at Belmont on a recent Saturday for the Woodward Handicap, a race in which the nation’s leading thoroughbred was entered. The weather was perfect. That card included the Grade I Futurity, one of the major 2-year-old events of what was once the Fall Championship Meeting.

The average weekday crowd count stops just past 7,000 since the NYRA’s ill-conceived simulcast experiment at Aqueduct was aborted last week. During the error portion of the trial-and-error debacle in South Ozone Park, the audience at Belmont fell short of 7,000 on most weekdays.

Yet, Belmont is a great place to go to the races, its problems notwithstanding. It is no longer a place, however, where one often sees great racing or even consistently acceptable racing.

Although much effort is expended to present large fields of substandard horses that are more betting fodder than horse races, there is no evidence of effort to improve the quality of day-to-day racing at NYRA’s race tracks. The major portion of the NYRA racing program during the spring and fall meetings at Belmont is not appreciably different than it is during the winter at Aqueduct.

The barns at Belmont Park are full of horses that should long ago have been ejected from the grounds of a race track attempting to offer a bettable product. Yet they fill races such as Thursday’s second, for $30,000 maiden claimers. It drew a vapid field of 20 abysmally untalented hoofed creatures, some as old as age 5.

No horse should be permitted to race as a maiden in New York after having reached its fourth birthday. Neither of the 5-year-old starters won the race, which went to a 3-year-old first-time starter sent from Delaware Park for the easy score.

Trainers from New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland have been sending horses to New York and winning races with increasing frequency and facility, which is exactly the reverse of the manner in which things are supposed to happen in Eastern racing circles. Friday’s program, too typically, came complete with a pair of maiden claiming races, one for hopeless 3-year-olds and up, the other for 2-year-olds whose owners have lost hope. This is parimutuel garbage.

Horses such as these must disappear before the crowds reappear.

Consider this:

A minimum claiming price of $25,000, now in force only at Saratoga, would be a reasonable starting point. Accompany that with the elimination of maiden claiming races and the requirement that a maiden must finish at least fourth within the first five starts of its career.

A 10-month season would make such refinements in the racing program easier to achieve--if anyone at NYRA is indeed interested in improving the only product it has to sell. A 10-month season and a five-day week would fit like a glove. And, perhaps, if NYRA presented racing upon which the players could bet with conviction, there would again be players betting at the race track.