Northern New Jersey racetracks are no longer under state control as private operators will now run the Meadowlands and Monmouth Park. You can bet both Jersey tracks with Idabet.com. Morris Bailey, the new owner of the Resorts Casino in Atlantic City has taken over Monmouth Park which ran an incredibly successful meet last year when it cut racing days and more than doubled daily purses. However, most of the purse money came from a major state subsidy from the casinos that is now being phased out. Though scheduled for 141 days of racing on the Jersey shore, Bailey hopes to cut the meet to 71 which would allow for higher purses and better runners.
Jeff Gural, owner of two standardbred tracks in New Yorks is now driving the sulky at the Meadowlands, the premier harness track in the country. Months of negotiations and contract revisions put the future of this track on hold until now. Gural is off to a slow start as only 86 horses entered his first day of operations. The Meadowlands which used to run both flats and pacers will now strictly be for standardbreds.
The five year agreements end three decades of operations by the New Jersey Sports Authority. Once the bread and butter of the sports complex, the tracks have seen steady declines in business from growing casino competition and the unchecked battle for race days and horses throughout the Northeast and Mid Atlantic region.
SARATOGA TO GET NBC, CABLE LIVE COVERAGE THIS SUMMER
In one of the biggest television moves in years for horse racing, NBC and it’s cable partner VERSUS will broadcast 8 Saturdays of live racing from Saratoga beginning July 23. The one hour shows will feature some of the biggest stakes of the year including the Travers otherwise known as the Mid Summer Derby. Outside of the Triple Crown which NBC now broadcasts, it has been years since some form of regular racing has been telecast on broadcast TV and a few years since ESPN dropped most of it’s feature racing broadcasts.
For more than a half of century racing has been criticized for not embracing TV to promote itself. In previous decades, tracks felt it would lose customers staying at home and their was no financial incentive for a track in Ohio to have a national telecast that included Alabama as their was no simulcasting or interstate betting. By the time racing realized TV helped fuel the boon to sports like the NFL and NASCAR, most networks had any interest in racing.
The national cable channels such as TVG and HRTV are dedicated to hard core players and do little to attract a new racing fan. Of course NBC, the fourth rated broadcast network and Versus, a minor sports carrier need ratings increases, so this could be a match made in the winners circle for each.
