2023-12-14
What first got you into horse racing?
For California boy Jay Privman, it was a family trip to Del Mar racetrack, where the surf meets the turf. For Steve Crist, it was a natural progression from betting on greyhounds at Wonderland, an old dog track near Boston. And for Andy Beyer (pictured above), it was a shared love of writing and handicapping and the realization that covering racing for a living provided him with the “perfect setup.”
Really, it was a perfect setup for all three men, each of them honored with industry Eclipse Awards for their coverage of racing. All are members of horse racing’s hall of fame with deep ties to the Daily Racing Form. Crist was a columnist as well as Privman’s editor there, and the Beyer Speed Figures featured in the publication’s past performances are Andy’s invention.
Each of the three, who appeared together on a “Legends of the Game” panel at the University of Arizona’s Global Symposium on Racing last week, spent time covering racing for a major daily newspaper. Those jobs don’t exist anymore, buried by the simultaneous diminishment of both horse racing and print journalism.
“Every major newspaper had at least one person dedicated to the beat of racing,” Privman said. “Major cities had multiple beat writers. That’s all gone away. There’s not one paper in the country that has a dedicated horse racing journalist.”
With coverage left to trade publications that are somewhat beholden to the industry for advertising dollars, “there are third rails that cannot be touched,” Privman added.
“Andy and I, we served as a sort of watchdog for the public, and I don’t know who’s doing it anymore,” said Crist, who has co-owned a modest string of racehorses since retiring.
No sense digging up dirt
Crist hadn’t written anything in quite some time until he read about a renewed call for the abandonment of dirt surfaces in favor of synthetic ones in the Thoroughbred Daily News. This came in response to a pair of high-profile breakdowns shortly before the finish line during Saratoga’s summer meet.
In a letter to TDN’s editor, Crist didn’t mince words.
“The campaign to abolish dirt racing in favor of synthetic surfaces may be well-intentioned, but is a dangerous knee-jerk overreaction that would accomplish little but the destruction of Thoroughbred racing as we know it,” he wrote. “These advocates seem to have forgotten that we tried this a generation ago, when Southern California, Keeneland, and Dubai all switched to synthetic racing — and then tore out those tracks when it became obvious that they were producing misleading results and undeserving Grade I winners and champions.
“As Bob Baffert correctly said at the time, synthetic surfaces make mediocre horses look good and good horses look mediocre.”
In writing and during the panel discussion, Crist pointed out that there were more deaths on grass than on dirt at Saratoga this past summer, yet there were no calls to do away with turf races.
“To my mind, American racing is dirt racing and there’s nothing inherently unsafe about it,” he said in Tucson.
“These are thousand-pound animals traveling at 40 miles per hour on spindly legs,” added Beyer. “There’s an element of risk involved in racing, just as there is in a lot of sports that humans participate in. … The sport has done a good job in recent years of driving down the fatality rates.”
Push back the Preakness?
The question arose of whether the Preakness Stakes should be pushed back a week or two in order to ensure the entry of more Kentucky Derby contestants who, aside from the winner, have lately developed a preference for skipping the Triple Crown’s second leg.
“I am a strong proponent of keeping the Triple Crown exactly the way it is,” Crist said. “The idea that four weeks after the Derby that people are going to care if the Derby winner wins the Preakness is very iffy. … One of the most reliable things in racing is that the Derby winner runs well in the Preakness. … When you run the Preakness has nothing to do with safety and welfare [of horses].”
Rather than moving the Preakness, which is currently run two weeks after the Derby, Crist suggested that host track Pimlico should improve the undercard, which offers $1 million in purse money compared to $5 million at the Derby and $4 million on Belmont Day.
“Rather than blow up one of the few things in races that works perfectly, I would try to make the Preakness bigger on its own,” he offered.
After Privman signaled that he was in lockstep with Crist’s thoughts on the matter, Beyer said, “While I agree that the trainers being scared to run horses in two weeks has never made sense to me, it’s a fact of life. Trainers of horses who run in the Derby don’t want to run back in two weeks unless they’ve won the Derby, and sometimes not even then. The Preakness has been a lousy race for years. Typically, you get the Derby winner and a few bums.
“I just think the Triple Crown tracks have to face the reality that the timing doesn’t work and the Preakness has been spoiled because nobody (meaning most elite 3-year-old horses) shows up. If you give the horses an extra week, that dynamic could change.”
Out with the new, in with the old
Though Crist, Beyer, and Privman are all at least semi-retired from covering horse racing, they still pay close attention to developments in the sport — including the emergence of computer-assisted wagering in betting pools.
“There’s one aspect of the computer-assisted wagering that really has distressed me, and that was the creation of a type of wager that was a gift to the teams of computer bettors that had huge bankrolls and could win it,” Beyer said. “It was started by the Rainbow 6 at Gulfstream and the whole idea of big jackpot bets that were paid out to a lone winning ticket.
“It was promoted by the industry as a great thing for the little guy — the small bettor would have a chance to win a fortune,” he continued. “The way the Gulfstream bets were structured, the little guy had no chance because the computer teams could play so many combinations that somebody betting a few hundred dollars was never going to have a unique ticket.
“I’m glad to see some places like New York have gone back to the traditional format of the Pick 6, but the jackpot bets have been a cancer on the sport.”
Some multi-track owners have embraced the CAW whales, with 1/ST (aka the Stronach Group) and the New York Racing Association taking ownership stakes in a platform called Elite Turf Club that caters to high-frequency, highly liquid players and syndicates. Crist sees this as a conflict of interest, saying it gives racetrack operators “financial incentive to screw their [smaller] customers” and calling for NYRA and Stronach to divest their ownership stakes in Elite.
Finally, a question came in from the audience concerning how the sport might diversify its fan and betting base, with Privman responding, “I’d like everybody to take a look around this room. There needs to be far better outreach to people who don’t look like you. We can’t go on just appealing to the same core, narrow group of the public for this sport to thrive and grow. That, to me, is as important as bringing in a younger generation.”
“We can’t go on just appealing to the same core narrow group of the public for this sport to thrive and grow.” – @jayprivman
Great discussions and questions for our Racing's Iconic Turf Writers panel. pic.twitter.com/pYoaa1FD5x
But Privman’s co-panelists questioned whether ramping up efforts to cater to younger bettors was really all that important.
“There was not a golden era when the track was full of young people,” Crist said. “It’s a game for people with disposable time and disposable income. If anything, we should have outreach to older people.”
“The sport has always appealed to an older demographic,” added Beyer. “That’s probably not going to change.”
Photo: Susan Wood/Getty Images
