For many years I’ve been saying to people that our sport has two things that none of the other sports around us have: legalized wagering on our product and the animal itself - the horse.

I’ve always said that those are the two things that we simply have to take advantage of if we want to prosper in this busy world of entertainment options.

In regard to legalized gambling, those of you that think I’ve forgotten about Pro-Line, I haven’t. I’m talking about real gambling, and not just giving your hard earned money away. A game like Pro-Line, where a player is forced to bet parlays, at odds much lower than what a real parlay would produce, isn’t really gambling, and I’ve never met a real gambler that would give something like that a second thought.

Now, as we publish this, our 15th annual Horseplayer’s Issue of TROT, I reflect on some of the things we’ve introduced, discussed, and/or proposed here over the last decade and a half, and I realize that for the most part we’re still just an industry of Win, Place, Show, Exactor, Triactor, Superfecta, and multi-leg wagers such as Win-4 or Pick-5. Don’t get me wrong though, as I believe that these bets still have their place, and are what our longtime clientele are happy with and have asked for. We have also had racetracks and horsemen’s associations step up, sometimes to a large degree, to help raise handles with initiatives like lower takeouts and jackpot wagers that players seem to like. I’m not saying that we’ve done nothing.

But we have discussed, in previous horseplayer’s issues, things like exchange wagering, fixed-odds wagering, in-race wagering, prop bets, futures wagers, match bets, parlay bets and many others. Some of these may work and some may not, but what I do know is that many of them have proven to be very successful ways of attracting a younger demographic to wager on both horse racing and other sports all over the world. Has our industry even attempted to try any of them? I guess I don’t truly know the answer, but to the best of my knowledge we have not.

The key to what I said in the previous paragraph is: many of these more modern ways to bet have been very successful in attracting a younger demographic to wager on sports. I know for a fact that one can walk into The Meadowlands’ FanDuel Sports Book on a Saturday night and make a wager on a UFC fight, and that if their fighter seems to be losing they can wager again, against him/her, as the fight progresses. Last time I checked, if I bet a horse that makes a break leaving the gate, I cannot bet another horse until about 25 minutes later - even though most would love to bet the horse in the 2-hole at the quarter (even at reduced odds) if they could.

And now, legalized, single-event sports wagering is coming to Canada. Ugh.

I give Jim Lawson and his team at WEG full credit in trying to get ahead of this issue, as he’s been telling everyone who will listen for the past few years that the racing industry has the perfect infrastructure to host the new sports wagering hubs, and much more. And he’s right - if we’re not involved in some significant way, many of our tens of thousands of horse racing-related jobs in Canada could be in danger.

We, as an industry however, have had many years to advance our own wagering options to appeal more to a younger demographic, and to a large degree, we as an industry have failed. Just like we had many years of slot money that we could have used to grow and market our industry in the early 21st century - unfortunately we failed there too.

It’s not too late to modernize our game from a wagering standpoint and make it more interesting to this instant-generation market with their faces buried in their smartphones and tablets. Just as the Win, Place, Show, Quinella-era of the ‘50s and ‘60s had to morph into the wagering menu we offered later in the 20th century and today, now, with sports wagering coming, we definitely have to morph some more.

But if not, we still have the horse, right?

What do I mean by that? We’re lucky to have real live horses as the stars of our show - every night. I don’t believe that we’ve ever taken full advantage of this and truly promoted them as our big stars though. For example, you could literally take these wonderful animals of ours into all of our big cities any afternoon, set them up in portable stalls and attract thousands of passer-byers to come see them. While they were there you could give them information pamphlets from the closest racetrack, as well as $50 betting vouchers and/or coupons for free meals in the dining room. People love free stuff.

And people love horses, right? Actually, change that from a question to a statement. People LOVE horses. It’s a fact. Hell, when my friends and I were only in our late teens we were always the guys who got the prettiest girls in the bar to come to a party at my place after last call. We may not have all been honour roll students but we were smart enough to tell the girls that I had horses at my house! The rest was history. The horses themselves didn’t always love having the lights turned on in the shedrow at 2 am, to a crowd of half-tipsy partygoers, but when it always came with forehead rubs and a feeding of carrots they usually got over it pretty quickly.

We still have the horse, right?

Dan Fisher
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