Where Did Everybody Go? Harness racings decline

https://harnesslink.com/usa/where-did-everybody-go/

This article is Nicholas Barnsdale’s thesis submission for his Bachelor of Journalism degree

It is USA/Canada based but relevant to Australia. Here are some quotes:

Since 1967, wagering on harness racing in Canada has fallen 78 per cent. In the United States, annual attendance sunk an identical amount from its peak in 1975 to the last available data point in 2005.

[I]The Canadian national harness racing handle, the amount which is wagered each year, crashed from an inflation-adjusted $2.28 billion in 1969 to $491 million in 2019. In the United States, handle in real dollars peaked at $14.85 billion in 1973; in 2021, Americans bet $1.72 billion. Attendance to harness racing fell from 7,612 per race day in 1965 to 1,600 in 2005. By the mid-1990s, most tracks had stopped publicizing rapidly receding attendance figures. It begs the question: where did everybody go?

There are many hypotheses. The most popular explanation is that other forms of gambling ended harness racing’s longstanding monopoly on wagering dollars. In Canada and most U.S. states, horse racing was the only way anyone could legally make a bet. Lotteries were banned in the United States in 1895 and did not return to the mainland until 1964, though states only began to introduce them in greater numbers in the 1970s. This is similarly applicable to casinos, though they were legalized earlier in states such as Nevada. Canada has a similar story: pari-mutuel gambling, the type employed by horse racing, was the only form of betting allowed from 1910 to 1970.

They never saw coming, that people would be sitting at home betting on their computers.

“I believe the sport has gotten incredibly boring,” he said. “It used to be like: people followed this horse, there was celebrities and personalities in the harness racing world ....... for the most part, the way that harness racing has gone, is it would be like, it’d be like if the NFL only had the regular season. And there was no Super Bowl and there’s no playoffs. […] There’s no grouping of horses so I don’t get to see rivalries form. I don’t get to see any storylines. It’s just another race.”

These instant media are often seen as a direct threat to horse racing, an affair which typically entails 20 to 30 minutes of waiting between each one-to-two-minute race.
“(There’s) just more things for people to do,” O’Donnell said. “Games, you know what it’s like, especially with young people. They always, you know, a lot of them bet online on everything, right?”
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