It was six years after horses first hit the homestretch at the Saratoga Race Course that the first professional baseball league was created. Professional football was still 29 years away, as was the first public basketball game.
But horse racing was already an old sport when John Morrissey opened his new track in Saratoga Springs, 150 years ago today. Nomadic tribesmen in Central Asia domesticated horses around 4500 B.C. and soon began to race them. What set apart Saratoga in 1863 was the innovation of a track that could allow big crowds of Americans to watch the races. It was, by some reckonings, the country's first mass sports venue.
But the crowds for horse racing have been thinning for years, to the point that there's unease in the air even as we celebrate this anniversary of what many people consider the greatest venue in the sport. If only all of thoroughbred racing were as grand and bright as Saratoga. Instead, the outlook is bleak.
Horse racing's fan base is aging. The amount of money bet, the number of horses racing and the number of race days are all declining. A study commissioned by the Jockey Club two years ago predicted that without a new growth strategy, by 2020 the racing handle and the number of viable tracks both will decline by about one-quarter, and horse owners' losses will grow by half. There are variables that could change all that for the worse, such as a significant expansion of competing gambling venues.
Nor does the general public seem to care. Only about one in five Americans has a favorable impression of horse racing, the study found. Even racing fans are dubious: Less than half would recommend racing to friends.
But even if you've never been part of the roaring crowd as the horses make the final turn at Saratoga, never cashed a winning bet or agonized over a loss by a nose, you should worry about the potential collapse of racing and New York's horse industry.
A study two years ago found that 33,000 jobs in New York hinge on the raising, racing and showing of horses — or an economic impact of roughly $4.2 billion a year. That suggests the troubled prognosis for horse racing isn't something anybody can afford to ignore.
Part of the problem is that horse racing is competing with both other sports and other forms of gambling. Steps that could help push the sport might make the bets less attractive, and vice versa.
Let's say we think of horse racing primarily as a sport, and want to build that. Sports fans get emotionally invested in teams and athletes and develop lifetime rooting interests. Couldn't that help horse racing?
Yes, except for the fact that thoroughbreds have a short racing life — they come and go in a year or two, typically — so their careers don't yield the great story lines that we get from the likes of Derek Jeter and Eli Manning. You could change that only if you can convince breeders and owners to set aside the allure of the huge stud fees that make it more profitable to retire a racehorse than run him.
Couldn't horse racing market the jockeys, then, as the face of the sport? They have remarkable athleticism, and many have personal tales of triumph over adversity. But that would require training the jockeys in media relations and perhaps linking them to their "teams" — that is, the stables and trainers they ride for. That's a model far different from the way racing now operates.
But let's say we think of horse racing as mainly a gambling opportunity. To draw in new and younger fans, the betting experience would have to be simplified, especially for online bettors. And competing betting venues might need to be limited. After all, a new casino next door, which could result from the expansion of gambling that New York voters will be asked to authorize, could diminish the handle at Saratoga.
Anyway, big changes in racing would require imagination, and the sort of collaboration among industry players like we've never seen. There's no Bud Selig in horse racing.
Yet there's some cause for optimism. Saratoga is run by the New York Racing Association, which seems poised to overcome its shady and slipshod history under the leadership of a new CEO, Christopher Kay. He's a former top executive of Toys R Us with no professional experience in racing but plenty of skill in leadership and in translating strategic goals to the marketplace. He's smart and honest, traits often lacking in racing industry leaders.
Kay has only been on the job a few weeks, but he has quickly grasped both the potential for racing's growth and the peril it now faces. He describes a fan grabbing his handshake with two hands, saying, "Please. Save my sport." As he relates the story, Kay's voice gets a bit husky.
To succeed, Kay will need the help of other track operators, as well as all the other players in the industry. But imagination and dreams have never been in short supply at Saratoga. The sport and the venue deserve another 150 years, and then some.