Gambling: Horse Races for Profit

How real is the danger that the loss in quality will react on the business of racing?

Over the past twenty years, the attendance of racing has grown 300 percent. The seven years in it has grown only 15 percent. During this same period, the number of racing days increased by 25 percent.

New York thoroughbred racing suffered especially in this period because of the new competition from the rapidly growing 사설카지노.

However, both attendance and 우리카지노 in New York are likely to be up a bit more sharply because of Aqueduct.

These figures suggest that the existing racing public is being more heavily cultivated and exploited, but that the number of real fans is not increasing - and may actually be declining.

The French success in preserving classic racing may offer a clue to Americans looking for a way to arrest the downward trend of our racing.

French racing is entrusted by the government to nonprofit racing societies that have a rank and responsibility comparable to, say, the French Academy, or the Comedie Francaise; free of direct economic pressure, the societies watch over the sport and zealously guard its classical style.

To be sure, their circumstances and perhaps their taste, are different from ours. The supporters of French racing are a homogeneous community, concentrated in a small world around Paris.

In the U.S., by contrast, there is no one racing community, only some millions of fans spread all over the continent, going to tracks that compete against all the other tracks for the horses available and that are regulated by twenty-four different state legislatures.

Since racing is centrally directed in France, the sport can be protected against the economic pressures and tax interests that beset it in the U.S. -- where no one state could reform the sport even if it wanted to.

U.S. racetracks, however, have a rudimentary national body in the Thoroughbred Racing Association which was founded originally to defend racing in wartime and which had made a good name for itself with its productive bureau.

John W. Hanes, chairman of the New York Racing Association, has proposed a national body combining all branches of the sport and the business.

Such a body might be able to formulate standards for the sport against the pressure of the betting handle and perhaps educate the state legislatures in the preservation of their golden egg.

More than seventy-five years ago, the authors of the authoritative badminton Library volume on racing, published in London, wrote with alarm about the revolution they detected in the sport.