SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. -- Fixed-odds betting on U.S. horse races could be a major business for sports-betting sites, provided the racing industry can work with regulators and other racing constituencies to smooth the way for its launch, racing and sports-betting officials said on Wednesday at a panel at the Racing and Gaming Conference in Saratoga Springs. Fixed-odds betting in the U.S. has long been a fever dream for some in the racing industry, but so far only one track, Monmouth Park in New Jersey, has launched a fixed-odds operation since the Supreme Court in 2018 lifted prohibitions on the approval of sports betting by states. In large part, that is due to a dearth of regulations explicitly laying out the legal groundwork for the practice, but it’s also due to concerns within the industry about cannibalization of existing handle and the lack of fixed-odds infrastructure. For Dallas Baker, the vice president of BetMakers U.S., which runs the Monmouth fixed-odds operation, the lack of urgency is costing racing. “Racing is leaving so much on the table at this moment,” Baker said. Paul Hannon, the senior vice president of corporate development for PointsBet USA, a sports-betting application company, said that racing could become the fifth-highest-betting sport in the U.S. if it achieved as much market penetration as other sports. The only more popular sports, Hannon said, would be NFL football, college football, NBA basketball, and college basketball. “There is a space for it in the mainstream, especially in the summer months, where it’s really only up against baseball, golf, and tennis,” Hannon said. “We have a really strong appetite to make sure racing has that position.” But for that to happen, Hannon said, racing would have to present an attractive financial relationship to fixed-odds betting operators, who have their hands full attempting to stay ahead of their competitors while maintaining fast-growing businesses. “We have a million different priorities we want to tackle, so making sure racing is investable, making sure there’s a guaranteed return on that investment, that’s very important for planning purposes, especially in the long term,” Hannon said. Fixed-odds betting is popular in many racing countries, but the results in the U.S. have so far been far hard to assess. A betting exchange in New Jersey that allowed customers to offer fixed-odds bets on horse races to other customers foundered after only several years of operation. And many racetracks in the U.S. are comfortable with the pari-mutuel model, given its predictable returns and long history, while horsemen can seem downright hostile to any notion that pari-mutuel handle might be cannibalized for a lower-revenue betting type. Michele Fischer, a vice president at SIS Content Services, which provides fixed-odds betting services to sports books, said that any concern about cannibalization by U.S. racing constituencies is short-sighted, given the competitive environment facing the sport. “There’s a lot of things cannibalizing horse racing today,” Fischer said, citing other forms of gambling and entertainment. “It’s already happening. … We need to find new people to bet on horse racing. We haven’t done a great job growing our base, when you look at the figures. Giving it a try is a very low risk for us. The risk of doing nothing is the greatest risk of all.” Baker said that Monmouth’s fixed-odds operation is “still in the beta-testing phase,” but he said that the operation hit its mark of accounting for 10 percent of all on-track handle just after it was launched. Fixed odds is currently limited to a bank of eight live tellers at the track, but BetMakers plans to make a website and mobile app available soon, Baker said. Both operations would be limited to New Jersey residents. David O’Rourke, the chief executive officer of the New York Racing Association, said that he remains enthusiastic about eventually offering fixed odds on NYRA’s races. But that priority has taken a back seat to NYRA’s ongoing and aggressive efforts to get its pari-mutuel account-wagering service on the platforms of existing sports-betting operators, which are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to build their customer rolls in the free-for-all that has accompanied the recent explosion of legal sports betting in the U.S. “Obviously we believe our product is going to perform well,” O’Rourke said. “We’re excited about it. It’s the biggest opportunity for racing, probably, in the last few decades.” But O’Rourke also said that racing needs to collect more data on how new customers interact with the online pari-mutuel model before doing a deep dive into fixed-odds betting. “Until we introduce the product to the store, we don’t really know what the customer’s reaction is going to be,” O’Rourke said. “And these distributors are excellent at this. Once the product is there and we’re pushing it, those distributors are going to figure out exactly what the right formula is for those costumers. And us as content producers need to work with those distributors on what the right equation is.” O’Rourke suggested that racing can soon thereafter transition to offering fixed-odds betting based on the analysis of that experience, preferably by presenting a cost-and-revenue model that is palatable to both sports-betting operators and the racing industry at-large. “We need to give them continuities so that they can invest,” O’Rourke said. “You don’t want to put them on a string. You want them in for the long game.”