Slot machines are drawing more people to Indiana’s two pari-mutuel tracks — but track officials may face long odds in converting those gamblers into the horse racing fans needed to bolster the struggling industry.
Hoosier Park in Anderson and Indiana Downs in Shelbyville both expect more than 3 million visitors during the track casinos’ first year of operation.
It’s no easy task to get new visitors interested in horse racing, said Richard Wilcke, director of the Equine Industry Program at the University of Louisville.
“If it weren’t a challenge, horse racing would be supporting casinos rather than the other way around,” Wilcke told The Indianapolis Star for a story Monday.
The horse racing industry lobbied hard to get slots at the tracks, telling lawmakers last year that the money brought in by slots could be funneled into horse racing purses. Bigger prizes attract better horses, they said, and that means more money for breeders and more interest in racing.
That may be the case, Wilcke and other experts say, but creating racing fans from the slot machine crowd can be difficult.
“As a general rule, the fact there are slots and better purses has not led to any added interest in horse racing,” said Bennett Liebman, a former member of the New York Racing and Wagering Board who is now executive director of the Government Law Center at Albany (N.Y.) Law School. “The idea is to somehow use slots to encourage fan growth in horse racing. It hasn’t been achieved very well in North America.”
Both Hoosier Park and Indiana Downs have seen the amount of money bet at the track on its own races decline since 2002, when Indiana Downs opened as the state’s second horse track.
Local track officials are betting that slot machines will help turn that trend around.
Rick Moore, general manager of racing at Hoosier Park, said that most of the track’s food and beverage options are on the racing side of the facility.
“People are looking out at live racing and seeing it take place and saying, ’How do I bet on a horse?”’ he said.
The track is helping new horse racing fans with pamphlets explaining the betting system.
Indiana Downs has a temporary casino behind the backstretch, but officials will get a better idea of the impact of slot machines once a permanent facility is opened next year, general manager Jon Schuster said.
“It’s important,” Schuster said. “In the big scheme of where all the money comes from, racing still is driven heavily by the simulcasts. Having said that, we want to cultivate racing fans.”
Early results from this year haven’t showed much crossover, though.
Hoosier Park’s average daily revenue during its recently concluded 71-day harness meet was $36,002 — a drop of more than $3,000 per day from last year’s 61-day meet. Indiana Downs’ averaged $42,801 during its 54-day thoroughbred meet — a nearly $5,000-per-day drop from last year’s 48-day meet.
Wilcke said the tracks needed to integrate the slot and horse racing facilities and promote big events, such as Hoosier Park’s $500,000 Indiana Derby each fall.
“I don’t want racing to get to the point where the only reason you have it is to get to the casino,” he said. “At some places, it’s sort of like that already.”
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