Declining Markets Foil Grand Racing Concepts

The announcement that Arlington Park will cease operations next month shocked the racing world and made headlines everywhere.

But in an issue of the Daily Racing Form that reported the Chicago track’s problems, there was also a single line of small print that revealed more depressing information about the current state of the sport.

At the bottom of the Belmont Park results for a September afternoon was this notation: “Belmont Park Attendance: 3,567.”

That pitiful turnout at America’s biggest and most important racetrack would once have been less imaginable than the demise of Arlington.

Arlington and Belmont have more in common than declining business. Both were the products of grand conceptions.

Belmont was rebuilt to accommodate the crowds of 50,000 that cheered champions such as Kelso in the 1960s, but it opened just in time for the introduction of New York’s off-track betting that siphoned away customers from the track.

The massive facility was an instant anachronism, a warning that racetracks built too extravagantly could be a burden rather than a stimulus too business.

So with the benefit of hindsight, one might say that Richard Duchossois should have known better when he spent some $200 million in 1989 to construct the best racing facility in the world. But who could blame a man for creating a thing of such beauty?

Almost every square inch of the Arlington plant is intelligently conceived and beautifully designed.

The “apron” of the track--the outdoor area next to the rail--is tiered so that fans can sit at tables and get a clear view of the races. Picnic areas were created to appeal to families and young people.

A classy simulcasting room caters to high-rollers. The plant and grounds are impeccably maintained: even the walkways to the parking lots are landscaped.

Arlington deserved to prosper. But as in the case of Belmont, it was overwhelmed by forces beyond its control.

Shortly after Duchossois launched his ambitious racing venture, Illinois legalized casino gambling, and a massive riverboat casino opened in the city of Elgin, 15 miles from the track. (Duchossois was spurned in an effort to get a casino of his own.)

Arlington got stiff competition, too, from the Kentucky racing industry.

When that state legalized intertrack betting and simulcasting, it mandated that much of the revenue would be channeled into purse money.

The hefty purses transformed Kentucky into mid-America’s major racing center--a role that Duchossois had envisioned for his track. Arlington couldn’t entice the horses to fill the high-quality races that it wanted to stage.

Duchossois had been blindsided by unforeseen competition. He asked, rhetorically, “Would we have allowed ourselves to build this track under these conditions?” His answer: “Never.”

But what galled Duchossois most was that the state made no effort to help him after his huge investment in Illinois racing.

Sometimes it seemed bent on hurting him.

The last straw, evidently, was an incomprehensible action by the Illinois Racing Board.

Arlington is racing on a Wednesday-through-Sunday schedule this fall, and it has trouble mustering enough horses to put on a competitive show five days a week.

Yet the IRB urged Hawthorne, the Chicago track that normally opens after Arlington, to operate on Mondays and Tuesdays, creating a seven-day-a-week schedule that stretches the horse population even thinner.

Even horsemen-who usually like the maximum number of racing opportunities-were opposed to this overkill. Duchossois seethed that the regulators were trying to micromanage the business in which he had invested so much.

This was the background as Arlington last week issued a “media advisory” that it would not apply for racing dates in 1998.

Pointedly, it released its statement on the day that Hawthorne launched the seven-day-a-week racing schedule.

Track executives subsequently said that Arlington will complete its current season in October, as scheduled, but it may never reopen as a racetrack again.

Many people in Illinois think this is a bluff, an effort to get significant tax relief from the state or permission to install slot machines.

Duchossois has told interviewers that he might be swayed by “dramatic changes in the way racing is structured,” but said he doesn’t expect any major changes to occur. And after losing $70 million over the years, he doesn’t intend to lose any more.

Illinois politicians seem uniquely indifferent to the health of their racing industry, but otherwise the forces that buffeted Arlington are very similar to the ones that most other tracks face.

Almost every racetrack in America is beset by competition for the gambling dollar and burdened by excessive regulation.

Most of them-and Belmont in particular-have been affected by fans’ reluctance to drive to a racetrack and spend five hours sitting in a grandstand; horseplayers would rather go to a convenient off-track betting outlet instead.

There is not a track in America with a months-long season that attracts consistently large crowds.

Even if there were no nearby riverboat casino, and even if Illinois’ politicians and regulators were ardently pro-racing, it is uncertain whether Arlington’s charms would have enabled it to prosper.

Some of the same forces that have affected Belmont would have hurt it anyway.

Duchossois’s massive investment was a mistake, a venture that was probably ill-fated from the outset.

And, sad to say, building such a spectacular racetrack is a mistake that nobody will ever make again.