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Originally Posted by ScottJ
Which brings us all the way back to one of my very first posts in this entire thread (exchanged with Steve Byk). Explain again why NYRA should continue winter racing? Would anyone really miss January and February? Why not close from December 15th through March 15th?
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A number of turf writers like to wax poetically about the way things were in racing 40 years ago, but racing today is a far different sport than it was forty years ago. The landed gentry no longer operate the only stables, and economics does play a significant role for many participants in the game. With respect to New York racing, about half the participants during the winter meet are NY-breds (if I heard Martin Panza correctly during a pre-Saratoga appearance on Andy Serling's At the Post show). These are obviously not the same NY-breds that competed in the days of Fio Rito and Fratello Ed. If you shut down racing in New York for the period you are suggesting, it would have a very negative impact on the New York breeding industry - both in terms of declining values for New York-bred foals and diminished payments to breeders from breeder awards earned during the winter months.
Ill-informed journalists such as Joe Drape like to throw around numbers that make Aqueduct look like a financial loser for NYRA, but as I always heard Charlie Hayward explain it, the fact is that, because Aqueduct pays lower purses, it actually supplements significantly the purse account for Belmont (where the incremental increase in handle over Aqueduct on non-Belmont Stakes days would not otherwise support its purse structure). Aqueduct's signal is still the third highest handle producing track in the nation during the winter (behind only Gulfstream and Santa Anita). For those who don't like the product, there are plenty of other tracks on which wagers can be placed.
NYRA operates a year-round circuit. Several horsemen live year-round in New York. What would you have them and their families do during the period that Aqueduct is shuttered? If you force them to relocate (Florida and Maryland are improving their products these days and aggressively courting horsemen), you may never get them back. While the horsemen that live in New York on a year-round basis may not be supplying the majority of the stakes horses for the Belmont and Saratoga meets, they are supplying a vast majority of the horses that fill four or five races a day at those venues. Marin Panza recently stated that it is a problem that a small number of the horsemen earn very large percentages of the total purse money; shutting down Aqueduct would only exacerbate that problem. Overall, an Aqueduct-less NYRA probably results in weaker Saratoga and Belmont meets which, in turn, presents a whole host of other regional economic implications.
And this does not speak at all to the negative impact that closing Aqueduct for three months would have upon the OTBs and their governmental beneficiaries....