Concentrated Wealth Is Killing the Horse-Racing Industry -- and Horses

Every year, on Kentucky Derby day, the movers and shakers of the “sport of kings” have a chance to thrill the American people — and recapture horse racing’s once-vaunted glory. This year, they fell a bit short. They didn’t dazzle Americans with the 2008 Kentucky Derby. They appalled them.

The top headlines, after this year’s “run for the roses,” went to the horse that finished second — and then promptly collapsed with two horrific broken ankles. Moments later, veterinarians euthanized the badly injured thoroughbred, the star filly Eight Belles.

Newspaper columnists, on and off the nation’s sports pages, have spent the week since the Derby decrying this latest in a long series of horse-racing fatalities. They've been fiercely debating who exactly deserves the blame. The jockey? The trainer? The entire horse-racing industry?

The blame needs to go deeper. Eight Belles actually died from a social malady, and that same malady — economic inequality — is killing off horse racing. Today's racing scene offers us up an unsettling object lesson on the heavy, even deadly, price we pay when we let staggering quantities of wealth concentrate in the pockets of a precious few.   

In our 21st century United States, we don’t talk much about this concentration. And we don’t much about horse racing either. And both these realities represent a real change in American life. Just a few generations ago, back in the 1930s, Americans cared deeply about the distribution of our national economic pie — and horse racing, too.

In fact, Americans used to follow horse racing more fervently than all other sports save baseball and boxing. Racing’s most famous horses routinely packed racetracks with 60,000 fans at a time. The legendary Seabiscuit could draw 40,000 fans just to a workout.

These glory days today seem medieval history. Most Americans these days only notice racing at Kentucky Derby time. The rest of the year, racetracks limp from day to day with a few thousand aging aficionados bouncing around in largely empty grandstands.

Horse racing’s top players have tried just about everything to bring fans back. They’ve bankrolled sophisticated marketing campaigns, hosted concerts, installed slot machines. Maybe most of all, they’ve prayed for another great horse, another Seabiscuit, that could thrill casual fans and thrust thoroughbred racing back into the limelight.

Their prayers have gone unanswered. No great new horse has captured the public imagination. And no great horse ever again will, suggest analysts like racing writer Andrew Beyer, because the really big money in the thoroughbred industry, ever since the 1980s, has come from breeding horses, not racing them.

Horses retired to stud can command, year in and year out, five- and six-figure fees for every breeding encounter. In 2006, one top sire, Storm Cat, had 111 such encounters — at $500,000 each. A single sire, in other words, can bring in tens of millions of dollars a year in breeding income, far more than the risky business of running races could ever deliver.

A victory in the Kentucky Derby, or any of the other two legs of the “Triple Crown” series that horses run as three-year-olds, used to launch the nation’s best horses into long racing careers. Now these victories launch the winning horses into lucrative breeding deals. Smarty Jones, the 2004 Kentucky Derby winner, retired right after the Triple Crown, after a career that lasted all of nine races.

This new career track for successful horses — win quick, then retire — has, in turn, changed how horse people think about breeding. Years ago, people in the racing industry valued the “soundness” of horses as much as their speed. They bred for both traits. Horses with speed but no durability made no sense to owners who wanted horses strong enough to race year after year.