SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – The U.S. racing industry should seek to raise its profile in the gambling market by piggybacking on the expected growth of sports wagering in the future, an array of speakers said at the Saratoga Institute on Equine, Racing, and Gaming law conference on Tuesday in Saratoga Springs. Discussion over sports wagering dominated the law conference on Tuesday, even on panels that were not necessarily convened for the topic. The prevalence of the topic at the conference underscored the nearly gold-rush mentality that has been unleashed in the U.S. gambling industry since the Supreme Court in May struck down a federal law, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, prohibiting states from authorizing the practice. Although it is far from clear how deeply racing will be involved in sports wagering in the future, several representatives of racing companies said that they were looking forward to capitalizing on the growth of the practice by pushing to present racing alongside new sports-betting options. That will require either racing companies getting involved themselves in offering sports bets or striking partnerships with those companies that will, so that races are presented on betting platforms or at sports books right alongside football and basketball games, the representatives said. Such an environment began to form when nearly every Las Vegas casino operated integrated race and sports books 20 years ago. “All of our evidence from around the world says that racing competes very well in that environment,” said John Hindman, the general counsel for the TVG Network, which is an operating unit within a company, Paddy Power Betfair, that also operates a betting exchange in New Jersey and is a major bookmaker in the United Kingdom. TVG’s parent company recently merged with FanDuel, the daily fantasy sports company, and the combined conglomerate is aggressively seeking to position itself as a major player in the sports-betting market. That merger was one of several developments involving racing companies and potential sports-betting operations since the U.S. Supreme Court decision. Gambling companies throughout the U.S. are seeking to position themselves for a potential domino-like progression of states to embrace sports betting, partly on the promise of new tax revenues. Jack Jeziorski, an official with the simulcast-marketing company Monarch Management, a unit of The Stronach Group, noted that it is still unclear if racing will be hurt or helped by sports wagering, since sports betting has the potential to cannibalize racing’s market share. He said racing needs to be involved in the drafting of sports legislation to make certain that any accommodations granted to sports-betting operators also be extended to racing, citing a recent bill drafted in Kentucky that would have allowed sports bets to be taken at thousands of outlets throughout the state but did nothing to expand racing’s bricks-and-mortar distribution. “That would be very bad for us long-term,” Jeziorski said. He also noted that many horsemen have opposed efforts to expand betting away from the racetrack because of the higher revenues generated by on-track bets, but he said that the industry “needs to be move beyond” that position if it hopes to remain competitive as sports wagering gains footholds in states. Because sports betting is conducted using fixed odds, the potential for fixed-odds betting in U.S. racing has begun to be discussed in various circles within the industry as a result of the Supreme Court decision, according to Michele Fischer, the vice president of sales and business development for Sportech, the bet-processing company. Noting that Australia offers fixed-odds and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, Fischer said that U.S. racetracks should explore their own options to provide fixed odds bets, mainly because customers in other countries have indicated that they support having both options for a race. “We need to figure out how to embrace it,” Fischer said, while noting that legislation and regulation would almost certainly be necessary before tracks could go ahead with fixed-odds betting.  Dave Haslett, the president and CEO of Australia’s Sky Racing Bet, which operates an on-line tote and bookmaking system in the country, said that the market share of fixed-odds betting has grown consistently since the practice was legalized several years ago, to the point where overall wagering on racing has grown. But he also warned that fixed-odds betting has lower margins than pari-mutuel wagering, which can lead to challenges if a country’s racing industry, like that in the U.S., has been historically funded by pari-mutuel wagering alone. “You have to take into consideration how the industry maintains its funding when you are changing that commission because you have to have significant growth in fixed-odds wagering to make up for the change in pari-mutuel,” Haslett said. Aside from racing-specific impacts of the Supreme Court decision, the discussion around sports betting at the conference revealed the stark fissure that has opened up between sports leagues and some gambling operators over the leagues’ support of a 0.25 percent share of all bets made on their games. An afternoon panel on the future of sports wagering became almost exclusively focused on that narrow topic nearly halfway through the discussion, with supporters and opponents offering arguments based on legal, ethical, and financial considerations. One speaker, Daniel Wallach, a gambling law attorney, brought racing into the argument by pointing out that gambling outlets that offer betting on races are required under a longstanding federal law, the Interstate Horse Racing Act, to compensate racetracks and horsemen for those bets. He also suggested that the leagues could use the existence of the federal law as a legal basis to press its claims for compensation from sports books. “I think there is a solid legal foundation for what the leagues are asking for,” Wallach said. The afternoon debate over the leagues' demand was piqued by the conference’s lunch speaker, Dan Spillane, a senior vice president of the National Basketball Association, who outlined the league’s arguments for the 0.25 percent fee during his presentation. Following it, casino industry officials peppered Spillane with questions over the basis for the fee, often in an adversarial way. The back-and-forth was interesting on its face. But it also underlined the racing industry’s willowy position if it intends to seek a share of sports-betting revenues for horsemen or other racing constituents. If casinos aren’t willing to cut leagues in on a relatively small share of their revenues – even though the action is based on games the leagues “have spent billions on,” as Spillane said -- it seems highly unlikely that racing will enjoy a tenable position at the bargaining table. Immigration issues hit home Earlier in the conference, attorneys who specialize in immigration issues and a prominent horsemen had harsh words for the immigration policies enacted by the current administration in the White House, saying that new restrictions on guest-worker visas and a crackdown by immigration enforcement authorities has led to severe shortages in labor on backstretches and farms. “It’s really a disaster out there,” said Rick Violette, the New York-based trainer who is a former president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association. The immigration attorneys outlined the complex web of policies that have been enacted under the current administration, as well as the administration’s pushback on congressional action to authorize more guest-worker visas. The increase in guest-worker visas was requested by industries that have relied heavily in the past on migrant workers, primarily from Latin American countries, such as racing, fisheries, hotels, and agriculture. “There simply are not enough visas to go around,” said Leonard D’Arrigo, one of the immigration lawyers, after detailing how Congress legislatively authorized federal agencies to issue 66,000 new guest-worker visas but the federal agencies, using their “discretion,” only agreed to authorize 15,000 more. The moderator of the panel, Andrew Ayers, a professor at the Albany Law School’s Government Law Center, which puts on the conference, characterized the policies as a “deliberate strategy of creating scarcity” in order to encourage companies to hire more U.S. citizens as workers. But the panelists said that the policy was having no effect on the number of U.S. citizens hired, because, they contended, U.S. workers weren’t willing to take the jobs, even at wage levels that compete with those in entry-level manufacturing jobs. “It’s surprisingly not about the money,” said D’Arrigo. “Even if they paid $16 or $17 an hour, they would not find the workers.” Violette said that U.S. workers currently have no tolerance for entry-level jobs at racetracks that require exposure to the elements, erratic schedules, early start times, and menial labor, especially when alternatives to those jobs exist. “Grooms used to take care of three horses,” said Violette. “Now we have them take care of five or six.”