I grew up about five miles from the now defunct Arlington Park Racetrack. In its heyday, Arlington was a major league stop on the thoroughbred circuit. The "Arlington Million" attracted the best horses from across the nation, packing the grandstand with 20,000 or more fans.
With the advent of casino gaming, horse racing fell on hard times. Today, it's a shadow of its former self. Many tracks have closed, and those that remain open are making money because of sweetheart deals that racetracks sign with gambling authorities in the states, which send a percentage of gaming revenue into the pockets of track owners, breeders, and investors.
As misguided as that sounds, it is a surprisingly common arrangement. Maryland uses as much as $91 million a year in slot machine revenue to prop up its horse racing industry. The state last year agreed to acquire the decrepit Pimlico track and invest up to an additional $400 million to upgrade it. Pennsylvania has sunk over $3.5 billion over the past two decades into its racehorse development fund. Even Kentucky, the storied home of American horse racing, relies on a similar machine. Without them, “we would have a few days of racing at Churchill Downs,” Elisabeth Jensen, a former executive at the Kentucky Equine Education Project Foundation, said, “and that would be about it.”
In the sports' salad days, racetracks would be packed and would generate billions of dollars in revenue. Now, the racing industry must depend on its skill in lobbying state lawmakers and gambling officials to keep the spigot of cash flowing.
Proponents of the industry tout tradition and the "equine economy" that includes not just breeders, riders, trainers, and farmers who grow the feed. There are the dozens of groomers and exercise riders who are employed due to the subsidies.
Besides, say proponents, other sports get subsidies too.
It’s true that football and basketball teams get tax incentives, but sports like those have hundreds of millions of fans. The audience for horse racing — except for high-profile events like the Kentucky Derby, which is booming — has plummeted, even as the rise of online gambling has made it easier than ever to place a bet.
Then there's the toll on athletes. Thoroughbreds are extremely fragile animals. They have little muscle and light, breakable bones, as well as a heavily muscled body. The leading cause of death of thoroughbreds is euthanasia.
Another key distinction: Those other sports don’t routinely kill their athletes. The antiracing advocacy organization Horseracing Wrongs has shown that 11,000 horses have been put to death at American racetracks since 2014. Driven in part by advocates and by landmark investigations by The New York Times, a new, federally monitored watchdog has already had a significant impact. Even so, hundreds and hundreds of thoroughbreds still perish each year. In one recent monthlong stretch, 10 thoroughbreds died in New York alone.
Given the small audience for horse racing, the danger to horses, and the use of taxpayer money that could go to other, more worthy causes, isn't it time to let horse racing sink or swim on its own?
“The biggest fear that our industry has is that the states are going to stop subsidizing, using slot machines to subsidize the sport,” said Jeff Gural, who owns three harness racing tracks. “Without that, there is no sport.”
That pretty much says it all.