Patrick Patten, Handride
I thought about expanding the title ala Dr Strangelove… to Horse Racing: Alive or Dead Needs a Fix or: Numbers Don’t Lie but Statisticians don’t Tell the Truth.
It seems that every year between the Breeders’ Cup of early
October and the Derby trail beginning in late January the writers, media,
bloggers, anyone with a soap box gets up and points out the ills of racing. It’s griping season. However, this year it was a bit backwards. To start we had the industry griping about
future prospects and the media defending it.
Peter Carlino of Penn National Gaming said, “There
aren’t sufficient numbers of racing customers anymore because they died.” Meanwhile, Paul Moran writes, “Racing's
enthusiastic presence on the Internet and social networking sites suggests
convincingly that the game is far from dead.”
One can argue both of the above statements are anecdotal at
best, and both have their points. What
caught my interest was Alex
Waldrop’s NTRA, post. Unsurprisingly,
Mr. Waldrop, CEO of the NTRA, came out in full support of Moran, noting the
many fans racing has in a post called “Fact vs. Fiction”: 50,600,000 fans. That’s a huge number, and everyone reading it
should feel comforted by the millions of supporters our sport has. However,
as a blogger the post made me cringe.
Bloggers are regularly cut down for cherry picking arguments, and facts,
and here is a prime example: 50,600,000 fans
It doesn’t take much work to see what these fans are worth,
how much of a “fan” they really are. $11,420,000,000
wagered divided by 50,600,000
fans means each fan is wagering $226 per year, $18 per month, let's say $4.50 per weekend. Is this our
fanbase?
What’s worse is touting this as a “good” number. It shows that the people
in charge of the industry are of the attitude “Nothing to see here, nothing to
fix.” And, what I consider dangerous is to come out with yet another article
debating the validity of the numbers. As
the leader of the NTRA, a job which entails, “bridging the gap between
perception and reality,” to come out and obfuscate the perception is grounds
for removal. Here we have a leader bickering
with blog commentators on the exact number of fans for 7 paragraphs only to
find his point in the final paragraph:
“After 10 years of
effort, we still have a long way to go”
You don’t say? Well,
for close to 4 years of it, Mr. Waldrop has been in charge, and here's what we have
to show for it: A fan worth $4.50 a
weekend, A
Safety and Integrity Alliance that has no teeth, an association that lost
the Breeders’ Cup and Churchill Downs. We
all hope those in charge are hard at work looking to make improvements, and not
just going along for the ride. But, how can I think otherwise now that time
is being spent squabbling over a meaningless headcount? Two and half
years ago a group of fans put together what we’d like to see from horse
racing. I still feel it’s the best thing
I have ever seen come from any of the alphabet soups of the industry.
I feel that the best product is not being put on the track. I feel that the structure of our industry is
not up to today’s business standards. I
feel that those in charge aren’t working as hard as they should. I feel a very large change is needed.
