Another one bit the dust this week, and most horse racing leadership shrugged.
Effective November 12, 1/ST TV no longer offers morning workout videos. For a decade they filmed more than 15,000 works a year from Del Mar, Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Saratoga and the South Florida training centers, Palm Beach Downs, Payson Park, and Palm Meadows. Their explanation was one sentence: they tried to share the cost across the industry and couldn’t find a path forward. The historical library stays up through the end of this month. After that, who knows.
Nobody could find a path forward to share the cost of the single most useful visual tool a horseplayer has outside the race replay. Not the tracks. Not the data companies. Not the industry organizations that tell us every year how much they value the bettor.
Brad Weisbord said it right on X. He called it a great tool for horseplayers and asked the obvious question: in an age of AI and technology, why can’t we click on a horse and see every work it has ever had? He’s right that it’s not an expense. It’s an investment. More information builds confidence, confidence builds handle, and handle builds horse sales. That’s not a slogan. That’s how the money actually moves through this game.
Ignore the noise this week. There’s always noise. The story is the contraction, and it’s happening on multiple fronts at once.
The shelf keeps getting emptier
Start with television. FanDuel TV, the channel that grew up as TVG and brought racing into living rooms seven days a week since 1999, is winding down. Studio production is going away, and the cable channel is scheduled to go dark at the end of 2027. A generation of horseplayers doesn’t know a world without a racing channel on in the background. They’re about to find out.
Fox stepped up and expanded its big-day coverage, and credit where it’s due. But big days were never the problem. The daily player is the backbone of this sport, and there is nothing on the daily to replace what’s leaving.
When I interviewed Everett Dobson, he told me The Jockey Club was looking into a solution for the FanDuel gap. I took him at his word, and I still do. But here we are, and nothing has materialized or been announced.
Now the workout videos. Next it’ll be something else. Pick your poison.
This is a skill game. Act like it.
Here’s what drives me crazy. Horse racing is the original skill game in American gambling. You can beat it. People do beat it. I’ve built a life on beating it. The edge comes from information, trips, figures, pace, workouts, finding value, trainer patterns and from the work you put into it. So what does the sport do? It takes information away from the people who fund it.
Let’s stop tiptoeing. The customer is the gambler. Call us horseplayers, bettors, handicappers, whatever makes the boardroom comfortable. We are the ones whose money pays the purses, the stall rent, the jockeys, the exercise riders, and yes, the people running the camera at 6 a.m. Every time you take a tool away from the gambler, you take money out of your own pocket. You just don’t see the bill until the handle numbers come out.
Meanwhile, there is an ocean of new players right in front of us. Tens of millions of sports bettors. A fast-growing prediction market crowd that thinks in probabilities and prices, which is exactly how a good horseplayer thinks. These people want an edge. They want data. They want a game where homework pays. We have that game. We just refuse to show it to them.
We’ve been here before. Every time.
This industry is reactive, never proactive, and usually too late. That’s not a hot take. It’s the record. I am tired of saying it.
We slept through the poker boom. Millions of Americans learned to love a game of skill, money and nerve, and racing, the sport with the deepest skill-based betting tradition in the country sat on its hands.
We ignored the sports betting explosion. Legalization rolled across the country, and the industry acted like it was somebody else’s party, then complained when the money and the attention went somewhere else.
Now prediction markets are here, and the reflex is to treat them like the plague instead of a partner. I’ve been advocating for exchange wagering and prediction markets since 2014. These platforms want event contracts. They want liquidity. They want engaged customers. We have all three. The question isn’t whether these markets will grow. They will. The question is whether horse racing is on the board or watching from the sidewalk again.
We didn’t just talk about it. We built it.
I’m not writing this from the cheap seats. At Past The Wire we tried to do something about it, head-on, with our own resources.
The Gambling Hall of Fame. We created it to do something this sport never does: recognize great wagers and the people who make them. Not owners. Not trainers. The bettors. And we deliberately made it bigger than horse racing, including sports and prediction market players, because the whole point is to put our game in front of people who don’t play it yet and let them see what skill and nerve look like at the windows. Andy Asaro, Mark DiLorenzo and I were the founding class. Andy Serling and Johnny Avello are among the honorary inductees. The site is live, the bylaws are written, and the next inductee is lined up.
Some will say keep it horseplayer-only. That’s the exact mistake this sport has made for forty years, talking only to the customers it already has while the customer base shrinks. The Hall exists to open the door, not to guard it.
The industry response? Interest. Compliments. Good calls. Kind words from very important people. Then silence. No meaningful support to date.
The Riders Up App. We took the same analytical engine behind our PTW handicapping model and built an app around it so the retail player gets the kind of analysis the computer-assisted wagering teams use without needing tote access or rebates to get it. That’s the point. Everybody in this game knows the playing field isn’t level. CAW teams have speed, scale and rebates the everyday player will never see. We can’t hand you their rebate. We can hand you their kind of analysis. Riders Up levels as much of that field as a single app can.
Same story. Interest. Nods. “Let’s talk.” Then crickets. The industry should be banging on the door.
I’m not complaining. I’m not surprised. I’m reporting. Because if a small independent outlet can build a Hall of Fame that bridges racing to the broader gambling world, and an app that narrows the gap between the retail player and the big teams, then the institutions with real budgets have no excuse for letting workout videos and daily television walk out the door.
Where does it end?
That’s the question nobody in charge wants to answer. Where does the contraction stop?
Less television. Fewer workout videos. Fewer tools. A retail player squeezed by takeout on one side and computer teams on the other. And all of it happening while the largest pool of potential new customers in American gambling history is sitting right there, betting on everything except us. Remember in Wall Street, Gordon Gekko said “greed is good.” I’ll add this now.
Gambling is growing, horse racing is shrinking. JS
Do you see the disconnect there?
In October 2015, I wrote a column called How To Start Handicapping. I argued then that racing was failing to promote itself as a skill game while poker embraced that very identity. Eleven years later, we’re still having the same conversation. Only now, instead of merely failing to promote the tools that make our game attractive, we’re watching some of those tools disappear.
We don’t have an attention problem. We have a courage problem. The game rewards skill. The customers exist. What’s missing is anyone willing to invest before it’s an emergency instead of after. Every business has a shelf life. Ours isn’t printed by the market. We keep picking up the pen, crossing out the date, and moving it up ourselves. There’s an old line in Rounders: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
Racing has been sitting at this table a long time. Look around.
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