Eaves On Takeout, Race Date Supply

Published: May 18, 2010 10:58 am EDT

"I think, in the short term, there needs to be less racing. Whether or not that's going to be the eventuality, I think time will tell

. In Woodbine's case, we'd much rather be racing...We'd love to be able to go five-days-a-week, 52 weeks a year. However, there needs to be a horse supply to support it and there needs to be customer demand in order to continue to justify it. It's not there today, so we need to respond to what the demand indicators are today, and we need to work towards building back to a level of racing that frankly we would much rather be in."

On today's episode of Trot Radio, Woodbine Entertainment Group's President Nick Eaves talks to Norm Borg about the touchy subject of takeout as well as the issue of race date supply versus demand. Eaves strongly feels that that the amount of product for customers isn't where it should be.

"I think standardbred racing will be around in five years, certainly in this market, but not necessarily if we keep doing it the same old way. I understand that people would be concerned at the notion of having fewer opportunities to race their horse, but if we just keep focusing on it from the standpoint of 'we have to provide the opportunities for a participant to race their horse' and not think for a minute about what it is customers are showing they're prepared to support, then we're going to keep going down that road of a supply-dominated proposition which isn't being rewarded by customers on which less and less is being bet. At some point, there's nothing left.

"So, we're not prepared to come to that. We need to structure a solution which has a significant amount of racing, because there's support for that in the Woodbine-Mohawk market anyway, but one that starts with a bit more of a connection to what it is customers are prepared to support and allows us to build, hopefully, more and more racing opportunities but we need to start with the current levels of demand."

Eaves and Borg also discuss the upcoming changes to Bet Night Live as well as the recent experiment on changing Woodbine's track configuration for harness racing. The full interview is available below.

Episode 119 - WEG President Nick Eaves

Running Time: 13:25

Audio Format: MP3 audio

Host: Norm Borg

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