That's entertainment
Horse racing at Woodbine, Bill Lankhof discovers, is attracting a whole different crowd ... younger, and with fewer cigars.
By BILL LANKHOF, TORONTO SUN
HORSE RACING once was known as the sport of kings. Times change.
Today the monarchy is mostly obsolete, and the only thing standing between racing and a similar fate is a blinking, one-armed bandit.
The slot machine has saved horse racing in Ontario. It has also changed horse racing, bringing it more into the sphere of entertainment than sport, as the cheery greeting, "Good afternoon, Woodbine Entertainment" suggests at the other end of the telephone line.
There's a lot to be cheery about as Woodbine opens its 167-day meet today. There have never been so many horses. The track is raking in record revenues that includes a mind-numbing $73.3 million on the slots alone last year. Horsemen are looking at purse money that has almost doubled since 1998.
Then there is the attendance. It topped six million last year, and many of those folks wouldn't know the Queen's Plate from the Blue Plate Special.
"There's been a change in demographics; more couples and a change in age," said Jane Holmes, vice-president of corporate affairs at Woodbine. We tended to have an older, male demographic. Now it's younger."
WHAT HORSES?
Yep, these days when people go to the races, some of them don't see the horses for the canapes and slot machines.
"Coming out to the races is more like dinner theatre," said David Willmot, president of Woodbine, "We've increased female attendance by 40%. That was critical. Before it was 95% male and the buildings were stereotypical grey steel beam and concrete with cigar-chomping stereotypes.
"But on the spectrum from entertainment to pure gaming we've tried to move towards the entertainment side," said Willmot. "People can have dinner, a drink if they like, play the slots, sit, talk and see the horses out there and think, hey, that's kind of interesting."
The changes have all been fueled by the slots. At many Ontario tracks, they bring in more money than regular horse wagering. That horses have been supplanted as the main attraction might irritate the traditional horseman -- but only until he sees his pay stub.
"Slot machines rejuvenated the industry," Holmes said. "Five years ago, there almost was no horse racing industry. Participants within the industry were bailing. Owners, trainers and breeders were leaving. I don't know if it would've died but it was struggling."
Tracks in smaller centres like London, Clinton, Sarnia, Peterboro and Barrie were on a death watch.
"If we hadn't introduced slots, we would have seen the closure of more tracks," Holmes said. "Horse racing took a hit as sports lotteries came in, and again with the commercial casinos. You could see where it was going ... the OJC sold Greenwood and Fort Erie because of the new forms of gaming."
But in 1999, the provincial government allowed slot machines at tracks. Since then, they've spread like dandelions on a summer breeze. There are 1,700 at Woodbine alone. Woodbine's gross revenue of $73.3 million in 2003 from slots represents its 10% cut of the slot machine handle, with another 10% going back into the industry to fund purses. The rest goes to the province -- a total of $1.98 billion in 2002.
Since 1996 the racing industry has seen an increase in jobs from 45,000 to 60,000.
"It's difficult to say where horse racing would be without the slots but I don't believe it would've created those 15,000 new jobs if we didn't have them," said Wendy Rinella, the executive director of the Ontario Horse Racing Industry Association, which lobbied the government to get the slots into racetracks. "It allowed horse racing to compete with other forms of gaming."
Between 1999 and 2002, said Rinella, the number of horses in Ontario increased from 28,000 to 34,000 -- 43% of which are in an active racing stage. "It's really stimulated the breeding sector which has a large spinoff in the agricultural side. Horses aren't like a dairy farm where two guys can take care of 50 cows. Horses are very labour intensive."
The cost of maintaining a horse while its racing is about $45,000 a year. When Woodbine opens this weekend there will be 2,200 horses on the backstretch. That represents a lot of meal tickets for grooms, riders, trainers, drivers, cooks and parking attendants.
"There used to be a saying that if you got into horse racing you'd lose money, but you'd have fun losing it," said Willmot, chuckling. "Truth is, it was a pretty dicey scenario. Today it's still a challenging business, but at today's purse levels if you surround yourself with good people you should be able to make some money."
The backstretch is filled with new trucks and trailers. In rural Ontario new horse barns, new training facilities and fences sprout everywhere. Willmot says he's never seen a time when more small investors were getting into the game in syndicates.
"People are approaching racing now with the idea that they have a good shot at making money and that it's a good investment," he said. The horse racing industry is now estimated to put $1.6 billion into the provincial economy each year -- a 33% increase between 2000 and 2002.
Slot machines have become such an integral part of horse racing that in Maryland, where the government recently rejected them for the third time, there is now talk that the venerable Preakness Stakes might actually be moved from Pimlico. The track is in disrepair and, horsemen say, without slots the racing industry in the state can't compete with border states like West Virginia and Delaware, which are stealing patrons because they do offer slots.
There is one concern about this golden goose. The hope was, initially, that slot machines would bring new patrons to the track who would then also wager on the horses. That doesn't appear to have happened. Instead, many tracks have become more casinos than racing venues with on-site wagering at provincial tracks dropping by $7 million between 2001 and 2002.
"There is a concern that the main product of tracks is no longer horse racing. I've heard that from some of the smaller tracks," Rinella admitted. "But they are more than anything growth pains."
MAKE UP DIFFERENCE
Woodbine is an anomaly. While its established clientele is spending money on the slots that it spent on horse wagering before, an aggressive marketing campaign has brought that new and younger demographic into the track to make up the difference. As a result, while on-site wagering last year at Woodbine was $301 million -- down from $319 million in 2002 -- it is still comfortably ahead of the $285 million bet in the pre-slot year of 1999.
"We were concerned about cannibalization (losing money from the horse wagering side to the slots) and we're seeing it at some tracks," Holmes said. "Woodbine is very different. Woodbine is the only track in Ontario where the majority of purse money is still generated from paramutuel wagering rather than slots."
In any case, even if race tracks now have more yuppies lining up at the slots than railbirds with fedoras and stogies, all those bets that horse racing is on its way back to becoming a country fair spectacle with a couple of hundred spectators in the stands waiting for some small-town mayor's wife to reward the winner with a crummy blue ribbon, are off. It's a sure thing.
GROWTH SPURT AT THE TRACK
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Paramutual wagering $796M $855M $886M $886M $866M
On-site wagering $285M $297M $321M $319M $301M
Gross slot revenues -- $45M $58M $67.5M $73.3M
Thoroughbred purses $49.8M $74.4M $78.3M $89.6M $89.9M
