“Really?” asked the Daily Racing Form’s Marcus Hersh on Twitter on Saturday above a picture of Arlington racecourse in the suburbs of Chicago. “Just rip it down?”
Sadly, after 94 years as the major racetrack in America’s third-largest city, it seems they really will. The 326-acre venue that staged the Arlington Million, the first race to offer a million-dollar purse, and where Rock Of Gibraltar so bravely failed to go out on a high in the 2002 Breeders’ Cup Mile, has been sold to developers. The 2021 running of its biggest card five days ago is expected to be the last.
If so, Arlington will be the second former venue for a Breeders’ Cup meeting to face the wrecking ball. The first was Hollywood Park, which staged the first Breeders’ Cup in 1984 and then hosted US racing’s most valuable meeting again in 1987 and 1997. Despite a rich history – Hollywood moguls and stars including Walt Disney, Sam Goldwyn and Bing Crosby helped to found it – it did not stand a chance when Los Angeles managed to snag not one, but two NFL franchises after a 20-year drought. Hundreds of Rams fans turned up to cheer in 2015 as a controlled explosion tore through the 75-year-old grandstand, to make way for the SoFi Stadium. A similar fate may await Arlington if, as has been rumoured, Chicago’s Bears decide to make the site their new home.
Hollywood Park, though, had been struggling to stay afloat for years. It was also situated in rundown Inglewood, three miles from Los Angeles airport and a country mile behind Santa Anita, below the San Gabriel mountains in leafy Arcadia, in terms of its glamour, location and prestige. Arlington is a gleaming, modern track, rebuilt almost from scratch after a fire destroyed its original structures in 1985, and the premier racing venue by far in America’s sixth-biggest state by population. How can it possibly be scheduled for demolition?
The answer, it seems, involves gambling revenue – but not in quite the way you might expect. More specifically, it highlights the ever uneasy relationship between betting – which gives diligent and careful punters a chance to win – and gaming, which simply sucks money from their pockets as a fixed percentage of turnover.
The owner that decided Arlington racetrack should be sold and demolished is Churchill Downs Inc (CDI). Yes, Churchill Downs, the home of the Kentucky Derby, the one race that can still grab the attention of a great swathe of America’s sporting public.
CDI is not short of cash, far from it: its share price has gone up by 271% in the past five years and bounced from an early Covid slump to $72.73 in March last year to close at nearly $184 on Tuesday evening with a market “cap” of $7bn (£5bn).
But the main driver of that extraordinary growth has been gaming, not betting. CDI’s acquisitions over the past 10 years include a casino in Mississippi for $141m, another in Maine for $160m and a $401m deal for a 62% stake in the immense Rivers Casino Des Plaines – a 20-minute drive away from Arlington Park.
An irony here is that a change to Illinois state law two years ago allowed tracks to open casinos and slot arcades in order to subsidise the purses for their racing programmes. CDI could install hundreds of slots at Arlington, pretty much overnight, and keep it racing too. But the margins on the machines would be affected by the need to divert money to purses so it makes more business sense to corral all their gamblers at Rivers Casino instead.
It is only fair to recall at this point that it is less than five years since Jockey Club Racecourses, no less, unveiled a proposal to sell Kempton Park for housing and invest the proceeds in a new all-weather track near its base in Newmarket instead. This year’s King George VI Chase on Boxing Day was pencilled in to be the last and while the scheme has made little progress since it has still not been formally abandoned.
But JCR, for all that its plans were horribly misconceived, does at least plough its profits back into racing. A better parallel on this side of the Atlantic is with Britain’s gambling industry, where gaming’s persistent ability to poison the well for betting has been evident for the last 20 years.
First, Britain’s bookmakers were captivated by the fabulous, risk-free returns from £100-a-spin roulette machines until a long overdue cut in the stake limit to just £2 brought their 15-year, multi-billion pound bonanza to a close. Now, they devote much of their energy to steering online sports-betting punters towards slots and roulette instead.
It is in their interests to push the idea that betting and gaming are simply two sides of the same coin. Gaming, though, is an enemy, not a friend, to betting, and all the more so at a time when a wholesale review of gambling regulation is under way, prompted for the most part by issues and concerns that largely derive from gaming.
It is a point racing needs to drive home time and again in the months ahead, because the gambling industry most certainly will not. The alternative is to experience a similar fate to poor Arlington and fall victim to the poisonous effect of easy-money profits from gaming.