Issues that need addressing; who will do it?

Published: July 22, 2014 01:29 pm EDT

As a husband and a father raising a family in this industry, it's hard not to be concerned about our future.

We are now subsidized.

With our province paying out more revenue every minute, hour and day than it brings in, how are we supposed to have any confidence we will have a stable future?

Hard work is needed from both sides if we are to grow into what we need to be and what the government expects us to be. But I can't for the life of me think of one thing we have done in the last two years that would constitute a forward step and show that we are getting up and dusting ourselves off since the falling out we had with Dalton McGuinty and Dwight Duncan.

I sincerely hope Premier Wynne has every intention of honouring her agreements to this industry we all call home.

But on the other side of that coin, when will we start honoring ours? We have done nothing to curb the exodus of horses and horsemen to other surrounding markets. We don't seem to have any plan to bring in new gamblers, or satisfy the ones we have? Although I'm obviously not privy to closed-door meetings, there hasn't been any chatter of any solid integration with the OLG.

As horsemen we can only change what we have the ability to change. Our product, the way it looks, and the way it is received by gamblers is definitely one of those things.

I have asked permission to form a small advisory committee for condition sheets so we can have some constructive dialogue between our trainers and our race offices.

I would like to collaborate with our horsemen's groups and tracks so we can better suit the current needs of our horsemen. Help them cope with racing their horses and navigating our industry better, so we can potentially spur reinvestment and hopefully new investment and begin to rebuild what is so badly broken.

Some concerns when I talk to trainers are usually:

1) The absolute lack of ability to make ends meet racing on the "B" tracks. Some trainers used to use these tracks as spring boards into WEG or class relief and a solid "B" track horse could still make decent money.

Those days are gone and what used to constitute a "farm team" mentality just looks to investors as a losing proposition. The lack of room for growth in this area is troubling because many of our investors used to come from initial grass roots investing.

Our horses, trainers, and investors need a starting point. The rough waters of WEG are sometimes too hard to handle and with not much in the way of viable options otherwise people are simply staying away.

2) We have people who will/would invest in Ontario, but with no stable claiming races being filled at WEG (at present we have an $8,000 and a $15,000 filling weekly) it makes it hard to have much economic churn throughout our industry.

Many of these owners have horses racing in other jurisdictions and are being forced to invest elsewhere or have simply give up. When Ontario horses and Ontario owners race in other jurisdictions, we all lose.

3) Also of great concern is the loss we will soon be faced with, when many of our three-year-old horses are sold in Harrisburg sale.

Typically every year we see this trend, but over the next two years we will have drastically fewer Ontario-sired horses and if we can't curb the exodus of our OSS graduates, the effects will be devastating on our overall product.

We certainly don't want to become a secondary product to US markets. We need to give people a reason to stay here, and invest here, or they simply won't.

By working hard to fill fair competitive claimers and finding new ways to keep our Ontario-sired horses here, we will be taking positive action ourselves that will pay dividends down the road.

This will only happen with open positive communication.

We can't keep waiting for people to fix things for us. We have an opportunity to help ourselves and it would be a shame to once again wait for a hand up, when we have the ability to get up on our own, right now.

Call it baby steps, but any step forward is a good step at this point.

I hope you agree and speak up, or what we have left, will hardly be worth saving.

Anthony MacDonald


The views presented in Trot Blogs are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Standardbred Canada.

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