Horse Racing: Gambling Or Sport?

Published: April 5, 2010 11:26 am EDT

“On opening day, Queen’s Plate day, a few other days of the year, horse racing is a sport but the rest of the year we’re a gambling game.”

In Friday's Toronto Sun, Jamie Martin, senior vice-president for Woodbine Entertainment Group, talked indepth about horse racing with writer Bill Lankhof on a variety of topics that revolve around racing's role in our changing world.

“For a lot of people, we’re an opportunity to gamble. These days there’s lots of opportunities for people to gamble on lots of things. Go back a number of years and that wasn’t the case — that’s the advantage we’ve lost.”

Martin also offered his take on other issues facing harness racing:

On the live product and attendance: “We’re focused not so much in getting people to come to the track as giving them an opportunity to bet on our races. For people to take 4-5 hours out of their day to come here to the race track, people just aren’t going to do that anymore to the scale they used to.”

Turning slot players in horseplayers: “When we went into it, our hope was that we could generate horse-racing fans from people who came because of the slots. I’ll admit we probably had some success but it’s been limited. It’s two different games. One is a game of skill trying to pick a winning horse — slots is certainly not that.”

To read the full article, click here.

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