Breeders' Cup is alive and, more or less, well
BILL DWYRE
Respectable attendance, a record handle and the fact all the horses left under their own power are indicators of the event's success. Not that the sport doesn't still have its problems.
Horse racing has been waiting for just such a moment, for that perfect time to puff up its chest, look the world in the eye and shout those three magic words. And now it can:
No horses died.
The 25th Breeders' Cup has come and gone. Last weekend's show at Santa Anita earned lots of A's on anybody's report card.
The facility was like an alumnus going to a 20th high school class reunion. Lost some weight, got the skin cleared up, spent large sums of money on new clothes and wowed the old classmates.
There wasn't a shrub at Santa Anita that went untrimmed, nor a candy wrapper that stayed long on the ground. This is not a new place, but the Great Race Place certainly cleaned up well.
It wasn't like the old days, when Los Angeles turned out en masse for events at Santa Anita, such as the traditional day-after-Christmas winter-season opener. Nor was it quite like the assessment of my beloved colleague, T.J. Simers, who counsels me that "nobody cares about horse racing anymore. Stop writing about it. You're killing yourself."
Somewhere in between lies the truth.
Just over 82,000 cared enough to attend in the two days, including 51,331 for Saturday's nine Breeders' Cup races. ABC and ESPN, while playing hot potato with the final day's telecast, had to attract enough viewers to make this worth their while. If not, it would have been on Versus.
The numbers generated for this can always be interpreted several ways. In most regards, this was the best ever.
At a time when the economy is horrible, a total of $155,474,553 was bet on the 21 races over two days. That's money bet everywhere -- at Santa Anita, other tracks around the country, authorized betting parlors. And be clear: That's all 21 races, of which 14 were Breeders' Cup races.
Last year, that total handle was $147,227,784. But there were three fewer Breeders' Cup races and the on-site action suffered because the event, held at New Jersey's Monmouth Park, went off in cold and rainy slop.
Greg Avioli, chief executive of Breeders' Cup Ltd., said his group's projections, once all money from all betting sites has been counted, see a 5% increase, and he called that a very successful year, "especially in light of what the economy is."
The Breeders' Cup was a one-day event for its first 23 years, before going to two days at Monmouth last year. The best one-day Breeders' Cup all-races, all-sites handle was in 2006 at Churchill Downs in Louisville, with $140,332,198.
