Racing Is In for Big Chill at Belmont : Breeders’ Cup: A relatively small crowd is expected today, reflecting the decline of the sport in New York.

Allan R. Dragone, the new board chairman of the New York Racing Assn., talked this week about the changing regime. “We hope to dispel that (New York) cab-driver personality,” he said. “That arrogance, or whatever it is, we hope to get rid of.”

New York’s three major race tracks--Aqueduct, Saratoga and Belmont Park, which is the scene of today’s $10-million Breeders’ Cup--have not been in a position to be arrogant for a long time.

Since New York staged its first Breeders’ Cup, at Aqueduct in 1985, Belmont Park’s fall meeting, a traditional showcase for many of the sport’s best horses, has had an attendance drop of more than 30%. Belmont ran five major stakes races, including the Jockey Club Gold Cup and the Turf Classic, on a recent Saturday and Sunday, and the attendance was 22,000 one day and 18,000 the other.

Last weekend, in gorgeous autumn weather, much better than the crowd can expect for today’s seven Breeders’ Cup races, the weekend crowds were 13,000 daily.

Friday, the day before New York’s biggest racing day of the year, slightly more than 9,000 rattled around Belmont’s sprawling plant.

Dragone, 64, has been in charge for more than nine months. A horseplayer since college and a minor breeder of horses, Dragone has been described as “the first head of New York racing in a long time who actually knows what it’s like to work for a living.” He has established more of a dialogue with state lawmakers than New York’s racing hierarchy ever had before.

Dragone said his office is open to anyone with complaints, a promise that could necessitate the installation of a revolving door, if the number of gripes to previous administrations is any criterion.

New York racing has large problems and small problems, and because most of them have gone unsolved, thousands of fans have been chased away from the track. Some have gone to off-track betting, a politically run system that started in the early 1970s and has generally been considered a disaster from the start.

Payoffs at most off-track locations come with a 5% surcharge, a policy that sends big bettors to their illegal bookmakers and confuses the casual players who theoretically could be converted into regulars. Insults to off-track bettors run on and on, and recently there was still another one: Newly available telephone betting accounts allow players to collect without paying the surcharge, but the patrons who go to the betting parlors have not found similar relief.

Mentioning the national stereotype of the New York cab driver, Dragone shows an awareness that his tracks are not as friendly as they should be.

The other day, as the horses were being loaded into the gate for a stakes race at Belmont, customers seated near television monitors in the third-floor cafeteria were rousted by a worker who couldn’t wait two minutes--the time it would take to finish the race--before he began upturning tables and chairs. By the time the surprised cafeteria customers rushed to monitors outside, the race was half over.

The weather isn’t favorable--it was 50 degrees at the track Friday and the forecast is only slightly better for today--and most of the name horses have been injured, so Belmont Park’s attempt to use today’s Breeders’ Cup as a launching pad for a new era has been hamstrung.

Track officials say they have sold about 40,000 tickets, so Belmont is bound to surpass the crowd of 42,568 that showed up at Aqueduct in ’85. The next-lowest attendance for the six Breeders’ Cups was 51,432. That was the count last year at Gulfstream Park, where the market is much smaller and the racing plant is considerably more cramped than the facilities at Aqueduct or Belmont.

Trainer Wayne Lukas, who runs horses coast to coast and is a big booster of racing, doesn’t think that this Breeders’ Cup will do well, either on the track or in the national television ratings, which have been soft even with more renowned horses. Ted Bassett, president of the Breeders’ Cup, said betting at Belmont and off-track will exceed $50 million, which would be a record for the series, but this is mainly because there will be more than 200 outlets nationally, which is also a record.

“There’s a callous attitude toward racing in New York,” Lukas said. “There’s much more interest in the bet here than seeing a sporting event. At Churchill Downs (where the Breeders’ Cup drew 71,237 on a raw, windy November day in 1988), you could close the windows and 80,000 people might still come.

“Here, they hassle you when you park your car, and now, with no marquee horses, you wonder what kind of a day they’ll have. On television, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people turn their sets off after they run the Distaff, and start watching the football games.”

The Distaff, which is the third of the seven Breeders’ Cup races, is the day’s most appealing matchup, pitting Bayakoa, the winner of the stake last year, against Go for Wand, possibly the best filly to race in New York since Ruffian 15 years ago.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Dragone is not operating out of a vacuum. He changed marketing heads and hired Tom Durkin, who has called all of the Breeders’ Cup races on national television and is considered one of the best on-track race callers in the country. For months, there have been rumors that Dragone will make other major personnel changes soon after the Breeders’ Cup.

Durkin is good, in a league with California’s Trevor Denman, but it would help if more people in the stands could hear the Belmont announcer. A reporter from Los Angeles stood under a speaker on the first-floor clubhouse last Saturday, and couldn’t hear one horse Durkin called.

Maybe 60,000 fans will find their way out to Belmont Park today. This would be quite a novelty for local racing reporters. “This has been a year,” one of them wrote recently, “when attendance has been driven to new lows and boredom to new highs.”

Horse Racing Notes

With Santa Anita out of the immediate Breeders’ Cup picture because the Oak Tree Racing Assn. wouldn’t agree to some terms for 1992, there is a need for another warm-weather site, and Del Mar reportedly is under consideration. Because the Del Mar grandstand is likely to be rebuilt in two phases, the track probably wouldn’t be able to hold the races until 1993. Churchill Downs is scheduled to stage the Breeders’ Cup next year, and Gulfstream Park is the favorite to get the races in ’92. Hollywood Park is not considered a viable site because of the current management power struggle there and complaints from Cup officials about race-day problems in 1987.

Gary Stevens, whose Breeders’ Cup mounts have earned almost $2 million, is still winless in 20 tries. Stevens, battling Jose Santos for the national money title, has four mounts today, and his best shot is with In the Wings in the Turf. . . . Santos, meanwhile, is the only jockey with mounts in all seven races, and he has excellent chances with Meadow Star in the Juvenile Fillies and Fly So Free in the Juvenile. He will also ride Steinlen in the Mile. . . . Stevens leads Santos by about $1.1 million in purses.