Our New Year’s Wishlist
Real Writing on Racing 💯
*Before getting into today’s piece, l wanted to thank everyone that has pledged or become paid subscribers. It was never our intention to create revenue from the Going in Circles Digest, as a matter of fact when I originally started it going to just be an addendum to the Podcast. The thinking was that we might get a couple hundred views here and there but clearly that was understated as our 223 posts since Jan 18, 2021 have generated over 225,000 views. Substack, our landlord who provides the platform, profits from its tenants charging for their work, therefore promoted signing subscribers up, has continued to expand our ability to create diverse media options, some of which we will be utilizing in 2024. While we will continue to offer the Going in Circles Digest for free, we will be allowing those who wish to donate to the cause to continue to do so. We truly appreciate people reading our work, interacting with feedback and sharing the common bond of love for our great game. Once again thank you to those who felt compelled to donate to the Going in Circles Digest! May the horse be with you!
Perhaps the vagrancies of growing older have set in but Christmas and the surrounding holiday season seem to have less impact than they used to. Certainly from a racing standpoint as December used to be reserved for the Aqueduct inner track, the last fumes of the long Calder meet and new beginnings out West on the traditional December 26 Malibu Day opener at Santa Anita. These days we have watered down extended meets at Gulfstream, Fair Grounds and Oaklawn to occupy us during the day with a revamped Turfway Park providing sufficient night action. Yet despite the pared down national schedules with fewer and fewer racing days, the season tends to drone on rather than conclude and start anew once more when the doors are thrown back open in Hallandale, Arcadia and to a lesser extent in Hot Springs and New Orleans. Perhaps the steady drumbeat of tracks closing has created a homogenized atmosphere with South Florida dominated by just a single entity, without the inner track to differentiate matters in New York, with a pall cast over Golden Gate, now in racing hospice. The mid-Atlantic tracks have fallen under the spell of sameness as Parx just goes on and on, Laurel runs so much it’s easy to forget that Bowie was once the main Winter track in the region and New Jersey racing went from a golden triangle of Monmouth, Garden State and the Meadowlands with Atlantic City offering a summer change of pace, to just Monmouth and a patchwork fall grass meet in East Rutherford.
The start and end of the regional network of meets is something that we miss without even realizing it. Calder in December was a something that everyone from the North looked forward to and then onto Gulfstream when the bigger outfits shipped south with actual racing in mind. The dark decline of New England racing and its two mainstays, Rockingham Park and Suffolk Downs left a tradition rich area of the country barren of live racing. Chicago is down to just Hawthorn, an aging facility that’s legislatively stuck splitting half its dates with the harness horsemen, who also saw all their local tracks shuttered. The San Francisco Bay area was a low key racing stronghold, as Bay Meadows and Golden Gate operated in conjunction with the Californa fair circuit…not sure that any survive now that the two main cogs are dead or dying. The end of the year is a time to reflect but these are not good reflections we are seeing staring back at us in racings mirror.
The new year is an occasion for hope though, and while it far too often feels as though that emotion is fleeting in regards to all things racing…let’s give it a try.
My New Year’s Wishlist for Racing
I wish that racetracks would see the light in working together beyond just partnering to raise partially hidden but definitely felt wagering fees. Races at major tracks going off at the same time is a terrible business practice that not only shows disregard to the most loyal and fervent of its customers, it does little to dispel the notion that racing is a poorly run industry. Condition book harmony and stakes schedules could both use some conjunctive work as well
I wish that racing executives would have more faith in the racing product and have less desire to bend over backwards for the instant handle gratification of CAW’s. They would bet on flying pigs if given a large enough rebate, have no allegiance to racing and at some point if retail handle keeps fleeing, the CAW’s will follow too. Improve your racing, fix your wagering menus, take a lesser % of CAW money if it means growing your product with actual people handicapping and betting on races.
I wish that we could start a movement to fix the egregious problem of poor stewarding by revamping the system from scratch. We have a weak system of choosing, training and reviewing who we put in the various stewards stands and it shows. The states and tracks have botched this for years and while HISA isn’t good at most things, a system that nationalizes the recruitment, training and oversight of stewards and modifies the rules of racing (to make sense!) would be a major step forward. Just don’t hire a single person from the CHRB or NYSGC! None. Zero.
I wish people would stop crying about “the breed”. It’s a waste of time, it’s counter productive and it’s stupid. Breeding horses is a giant crapshoot in which it takes years and years before you find out if the decisions that you made were the right or wrong ones…and that’s just the tale of a single horse. Squawk all you’d like but it’s the new ‘dumbest theory people keep muttering about’, taking over from the ‘a Triple Crown winner will save racing’. Are horses less hardy and more stamina challenged than horses were 40 years ago? Sure. Can that trend be reversed? Of course not. Breeders produce what people want to purchase and even those that breed to race can’t simply reverse course with their broodmare bands or even find a 1970’s stallion to breed to. Many top European stallions have the same foundation bloodlines as most of the domestic studs that so many wring hands over. Starting with the massive foundation stallion Sadlers Wells, the top stallions across the pond are teeming with the same American blood of Mr Prospector or Northern Dancer including Frankel, Sea The Stars, Dubawi, Kingman and many, many more. The claim that stallions need to prove more on the racetrack is also belied by the fact that a great deal of top euro studs weren’t exactly over-raced and the entire continent of South America has relied on stallions who failed elsewhere or had excellent pedigrees yet soft racing records. This isn’t to say that the entire enterprise of thoroughbred racing wouldn’t benefit from top horses racing longer because it would. However this idea that some Lexington stud operation can snap their fingers and come up with a breed changing Sir Gallahad III type (Google him) to reverse what supposedly ails the breed is either myopic or ridiculous.
I wish NYRA would change the name of the Pennine Ridge stakes to a more deserving recipient. It’s been unofficially explained that the race was named to honor the late NYRA Chairman Allan Dragone who owned Pennine Ridge when he campaigned in NY in the early 90’s. That was a nice sentiment but the horse and his career are not worthy of an increasingly important 3 year old grass race. Admittedly this isn’t exactly a pressing issue but there are plenty of other ways to memorialize a significant contributor that don’t involve a pretty ordinary horse having a grade II race named for them.
I wish people would stop heaping praise on horses that only face the starter a handful of times a year…yet complain that horsemen don’t run enough anymore. Pot meet kettle…
I wish tracks would consider a handicap/ratings system to create a better, fairer racing product. There are a lot of obstacles to getting this off the ground but the alternative is continuing to use increasingly ineffective conditions that are not only far from optimal, but seem to favor a small, select group.
I wish someone besides me would ask why Equibase is a for-profit business? Surely the revenues raised by disseminating the industry’s data could be used in a more useful fashion than funneling it back to racetracks and whatever other mysterious black holes it flows to. Come to think, along those same lines, when a track closes up shop for the final time and they have overpaid on purses…take the difference out of the proceeds of sale of the property and don’t whine.
I have a lot more but this isn’t War and Peace (for millennials…it’s a book) and I wish all that follow the Going in Circles Digest and listen to the Going in Circles Podcast have a happy and healthy 2024! Hope to see you at the races or sales or wherever else we all may roam! Let’s hear your wishes for the new year!
I'm just here for the Pennine Ridge talk. And so I don't get fined.
Wish number 3 has already been granted in Oklahoma. Like most civilized racing countries, they adopted Category 1 rules. It's so straightforward it is virtually idiot proof and costs nothing to implement. Only in the US and France do these ridiculous stewards decisions even enter people's consciousness.