At the risk of stating the obvious, horseracing is at its core a gambling business. For decades, the proverbial $2 bet funded this industry. As competition – lotteries, casinos, sports betting – began to arise at the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st, the wagering on racing was no longer enough to sustain business. So, that’s when the industry – through its well-paid, connected lobbyists – embarked on a plan to get the various states to subsidize it. And it has worked swimmingly – to the tune of about a billion dollars a year. In short, horseracing in 2026 is, on the whole, a failed business.
While the above is unequivocally true, it’s always nice when insiders publicly admit it. In a Thoroughbred Daily News article on “handle” published Sunday, Sobhy Sonbol writes: “To understand why race days are disappearing we need to follow the money. And when you do, you arrive at a conclusion the industry has been reluctant to say out loud: horse racing, as a wagering business, is no longer self-sustaining.”
Then, on computer-assisted wagering (CAWs): “Without [it] we are looking at roughly $8 billion [in total handle in 2025], which in inflation-adjusted terms is less than a third of the 2003 peak. The human bettor, the person at the track or on their phone wagering because they have a hunch about a horse, has largely left the building.”
Sonbol then says that “the wagering business cannot keep the lights on,” and then rhetorically asks, what does? “Casino slots and historical horse racing terminals at racinos.” Yes, of course, with Sonbol confirming the obvious: “This is not a supplement. Take it away and purse levels across the country collapse overnight. And it is revenue that has nothing to do with the quality of racing. It comes from slot machines in buildings that happen to be attached to racetracks, distributed through state-level agreements that can be renegotiated or eliminated at any time. … Record purses while the handle declines is not a sign of a healthy industry. It is the signature of a subsidized one.”
And finally, on the behemoth that is legal sports betting – that would be wagering on real sports involving consensual, autonomous human beings: “Our entire industry handle is 6.6% of the legal sports betting market. We are not at the table.”
Sonbol, of course, has a prescription, which I won’t get into here but suffice to say it’s pie in the sky. Bottom line, our challenge is clear: “eliminate [those] state-level agreements” and most of U.S. Racing collapses like a house of cards. And, I can assure you, we at HW are working diligently on doing just that.
The landscape of gambling changed permanently with the legalization of sports betting. Horse racing historically enjoyed a legal monopoly on domestic online wagering in the U.S. Now, horse racing must compete directly with apps like DraftKings and FanDuel. Horse racing’s entire handle is a tiny fraction (6.6%) of the legal sports betting market. Younger generations are choosing to bet on football, basketball, or MMA, sports featuring autonomous human athletes, rather than a sport with a steep learning curve, high takeout rates (the track’s cut of the bet), and growing public pushback regarding animal welfare. Horse racing in 2026 is an industry operating on borrowed time and borrowed money.
Karen, thank you for bringing that up about the underemployed. For people who work at jobs paying minimum wage, there is no such thing as PTO, Paid Time Off.
PTO is for people who have careers working for companies that are providing some type of service that requires either college or trade school training, specific skills and knowledge, and a degree or certificate, and certification required by the state they live and work in.
Also, for those who work minimum wage jobs, there is no such thing as Unemployment Compensation, since the amount of money in the form of wages during a certain period of time doesn’t reach the requirements, such as the income levels of people who belong to the AFL-CIO and pay union dues and get paid multiple times more dollars-per-hour on road construction and building construction jobs than those minimum wage workers working at places such as your local restaurants and motels.
One of my pet peeves back in the early 1990s was that companies were saving money and screwing their employees over by reducing the hours worked from 40-hours considered Full-time with benefits to a 39-hour work week considered Part-time with NO BENEFITS.
Just because the New York Racing Association is full of themselves and obviously don’t really care about lower income bracket people or the lives of the horses they exploit, I expect them to continue to lobby for “free money” until they can’t get enough horses to fill their race cards.
They’re greedy and they don’t care.
Patrick, has this been published as an op ed in newspapers? I think it’d go over well in the area around Belmont, which was basically rebuilt using NY taxpayers’ money. And, although I’m a member of the Bills Mafia, I’m still mad that our taxes were used to construct a brand new stadium for the Buffalo Bills. A stadium with higher ticket prices that seats less fans than the old stadium. It seems aid to the poor, disabled, elderly, kids, the environment be damned. Americans need their sports venues-even for sports that get barely anyone to attend nowadays, like racing.
People are barely making it. Too many are underemployed, and wouldn’t think of calling in sick to a job that may not even have paid sick days, to go watch horses be abused with the blessing of the government. They can’t afford even a $2 bet, a hot dog and a beer while at the track.
If you haven’t submitted this column to newspapers, please do so! It’s bad enough our local, county, state and federal governments bend over backwards to give wealthy corporations tax breaks and subsidize expansion or locations, they also pay for horses to be abused, on a daily basis, at tracks no one goes to, tracks the government uses our taxes to support. I’m so sick of this corporate and sports welfare.