This is usually a fun part of the year. If you were lucky enough to have had a great racing season, the trophies are on the mantel, the winner’s circle photos are back from the framers and up on the walls and the race replays are on a continuous loop in the DVD player. And if it was a disappointment, it’s time to turn the page. The colts are hooked and going, and trainers are emailing with first impressions. Some babies are pacing free-legged, ears forward, leaning into their snaffle bits and striding alongside their peers, eager to pass if given the opportunity. The schedules come from the staking services, and you start to think, which races will I put them in?
This year is different. This year, I look at the stakes engagements and wonder, which races will actually be contested? Which tracks will even be open? Which tracks will decide early in 2011 to ditch their stakes schedules and stick to their subsistence-level overnight racing? Which stallions will be packing up and heading toward jurisdictions with racinos? Which new stallions will crowd out the established sires in those same states? How can the same four or five-stud farms keep adding the brightest lights of the past racing season without cannibalizing the demand for last year’s champion, or for what’s-his-name-again, the headline horse from three years ago?
Many of us have been standing on the edge of the cliff for a few years already, but now the pebbles are starting to fall away from under our feet. And yet, people are still spending money in this business. There are people out there who are writing checks for millions and millions of dollars of yearlings and stallion syndications. The Takters and Burkes and Erv Millers and Menarys and Gillises and Colemans, have never made more money, or spent more money. The rich get richer in this business, and the poor, well, in a few years, we won’t even remember who they were. They’ll be gone. We live in a time where the most successful trainers have 50 horses in the barn, 80 horses, 100 or more. And each year, another group of smaller trainers leave the business. It’s the new normal, three and four horses from the same stable in every stakes race, in every top-class overnight. Perhaps it reflects the economy at large, at least here in the United States: 10 per cent of the population controls 60 per cent of the wealth, or something like that. Why should it be any different in harness racing? The haves prosper like never before, the have-nots are driven out of the business. In a sport based on competition, the competitors grow fewer by the day.
I guess most of my friends up North are okay with this. Because when Standardbred Canada offered up a plan to try and do something about where this sport is headed, the only potential game-changer on the horizon, and amass a war chest of money for marketing, for publicity, to do something, for god’s sake, I believe every horseman’s organization up there refused to participate. “No one’s taking a percentage of our money, not even five per cent, without us having some control,” or words to that effect. Well, my friends, wrap your minds around this: it’s not your money. It’s welfare money. You’re all on welfare. Look at the handle, look at the purses, especially at the B-tracks. It’s welfare, and rather than using some of that money for the common good, so one day maybe, to some extent, the sport can be a little less dependant on welfare dollars, most of you said “Shove it!” One of the harshest criticisms of any welfare system is that it eventually makes its recipients unwilling or even unable to go back to work. To make sacrifices. People feel entitled to handouts. Sound familiar? Well, it’s time to change the culture. Make the decision to put the money aside. Figure out what to do with it afterwards. Make the sacrifice. Go back to work.
