Furlongs Behind

By Sean Gregory/Baltimore

And down the stretch they come at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Course on a bright Wednesday afternoon. Today the home of the Preakness Stakes and the famous Seabiscuit--War Admiral match race of 1938--perhaps the sport's greatest moment--is host to a $14,500 claiming race, and Robin des Tune, at 13 to 1, leads by three lengths. The chestnut filly gallops past 8,000 empty seats and withstands a late charge by Halo's Gem, the favorite, to seal the win. In the once exclusive box seats, Constantine Kimos, a retired butcher surrounded by a dozen desolate rows, glances at his card. He had two bucks on Halo's Gem. "I lost," he says.

He's got an entire industry to keep him company. Track closures, creaky grandstands, an aging fan base--the Thoroughbred industry has been losing since the 1960s, when the sport of kings missed the television boom, fearing that living-room exposure would keep the faithful from the track. With more recent competition from casinos, riverboats and state lotteries, annual on-track wagering, or handle, has slipped 28% since 1996, to $2.1 billion. The sport still has its grand days--the Triple Crown, the Breeders' Cup, summer in Saratoga, N.Y. But day-to-day, racing is like the 69-year-old Kimos, just hanging around killing time.

Horse-racing fans had great hopes that a sentimental film about the sport, Seabiscuit, would reignite interest. The movie, which opened in July, did a respectable $118 million at the box office. But it didn't have legs. The overall handle was up 5.5% in August, and many tracks got a bump--Saratoga set attendance records, and the crowd at Arlington Park, near Chicago, jumped 16%. But others actually fared worse. Summer attendance at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette, La., declined 3%, and Bay Meadows, near San Francisco, has seen a 2% drop this fall. Arlington Park's on-track handle is down 1% since the movie's release. "I haven't noticed any marked improvement since Seabiscuit," says Ryan Worst, an analyst for C.L. King & Associates. "People are smart enough to know that the depiction of an industry 60 years ago does not correlate with the experience at the racetrack today," says Tom Aronson, a racing consultant. "That would be like going to Yankee Stadium and waiting for Babe Ruth to show."

There is at least one outfit trying to reverse the sport's direction. Magna Entertainment Corp. (MEC), a spin-off of Canadian auto-parts maker Magna International, has spent about $1 billion to buy 12 U.S. tracks over the past five years, including Pimlico and Bay Meadows. The company may also bid for the scandal-plagued New York Racing Association's tracks, which include Saratoga and Belmont Park. "I love horses, but I just got bored going to the racetrack," says Frank Stronach, Magna's chairman, who became one of the world's top breeders while he was making billions of dollars selling car seats. "They're so cliquey, so clubby, so badly run. So I decided to jazz them up."

Stronach plans to convert each old track into a mini-Vegas with shopping, live entertainment and, most important, "racinos," or racetrack casinos, that fatten purses and improve race quality. But MEC has met an old problem--the hostile statehouse. Racinos are legal in just seven states, and other industries, like hotels, won't let lawmakers legislate slots at tracks at their expense. "Why save racing?" asks Robert Goodman, a professor at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of The Luck Business. "The car companies are struggling--does that mean we should put slot machines in showrooms?"

In the long term, racing will thrive only if track owners can create legions of new fans. And slots at the track can't accomplish that. "Tracks need racinos to compete," says Richard Thalheimer, a Louisville University equine economist. "But in the end, horse racing can only be saved if a significant percentage of casino players become horse players." And that, for now, has to be considered a long shot.