Racing Symposium: What racing did right during the pandemic

Racetracks survived, and, in some cases, thrived, during the height of the pandemic last year by capitalizing on television and account wagering and modifying racing schedules to better position themselves in the simulcast marketplace, track executives said on a Wednesday afternoon panel at the Global Symposium on Racing.

While the broad strokes of that transition have been outlined prior to the symposium, the Wednesday panel focused on smaller decisions made during the midst of the pandemic that ended up having larger impacts on industry operations, both during the pandemic and in the future.

Tony Allevato, the president of NYRA Bets and the chief revenue officer of the New York Racing Association, credited the amount of cooperation that NYRA received from other tracks during the spring and summer of 2020, when it was attempting to acquire content for a daily racing television show on Fox Sports.

“You’d call people up and you’d ask them can you do this or can you do that, and the vast majority of people were bending over backwards to shift their post times or the time between races,” Allevato said. “It was everyone coming together.”

Some of that wasn’t entirely altruistic. Andrew Offerman, the vice president of racing operations at Canterbury Park, said that officials at his track had watched what had occurred with skyrocketing handle numbers at tracks that stayed open in the early days of the pandemic and decided that the track would look for open windows in the simulcast market.

“We knew we had to maximize off-track handle,” Offerman said, so the track shifted its live-racing calendar from an “attendance-driven model” of Thursday through Sunday to time slots that stood out in the simulcast market in the early evenings from Monday through Thursday.

But Offerman said that the shift also forced the track to think about all aspects of operations in different ways. To further stand out among other tracks, Canterbury offered a low-takeout pick 5 and spent all of its advertising dollars – “sometimes in kind of strange ways” – to raise its visibility on account-wagering platforms.

In addition, because so few tracks were running live and Canterbury received an influx of horses from Arizona, where Turf Paradise had canceled its meet, Canterbury’s racing office slimmed its condition book.

“We took out a lot of conditions to try to open up every race we possibly could, to get every horse that wanted to race an opportunity to,” Offerman said. Average field size ended up topping 10 horses a race at the meet in 2020.

Eric Halstrom, another panelist, who is the vice president and general manager of Indiana Grand, also said that his track changed post times and race dates in order to stand out on ADW platforms. In a bizarre test case, Indiana Grand changed the first post time for its two Quarter Horse-only summer cards to 10 a.m.

“And that’s because we knew that the first person who arrived at the OTB or racetrack would turn the TVs on about that time and that would be the only live signal on,” Halstrom said. “And we’d also be on TVG early in the morning.” The two cards drew more than $1 million in bets, records for the track for a Quarter Horse date.

Both Canterbury and Indiana also moved major stakes races to weekdays instead of weekends, a trend that continued into 2021.

Halstrom also said that as a result of an early brainstorming session during the pandemic, the track invested in a drone. One of the reasons was to give stewards an additional angle to consider during objections or inquiries. The other was to provide unique perspectives for its simulcast signal.

Halstrom said that stewards told him after the meet was over in 2020 that they decided probably 10 adjudications on the drone feed alone. After he heard that, he hit on the biggest benefit of the drone idea.

“If you can ensure your customers [that they will] have an even better shake at the races by giving your stewards a resource that not many other people use, then it’s a win,” he said.