Attendance has dipped 35% from 37,562 in 1985 to Saturday's 24,521 and live on-track handle has plummeted 62% from $4.4 million to $1,649,385 million.
BY LENNY NESLIN / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 2012, 6:58 PM
Harness racing executives say the sport is in danger of dying in New Jersey. Jeff Gural stepped up to the challenge with one main goal: make the Meadowlands cool to attract a younger crowd.
Without the help of a casino, the primary source of revenue at most tracks, there are no boundaries for Gural's marketing plan, which so far has included racing ostriches and camels.
Approximately 85% of the track's simulcast customers last year were regular customers over 50 years old. "Unless you replace those old customers with new customers, you have a gloomy future," Gural said.
Through 75 live racing days this year as compared to last, attendance is up 7.2% and the live on-track handle has increased 8.3%. But it's the sport's overall trend that has executives worried.
Since Bill O'Donnell drove Prakas to victory on 1985's record-setting Hambletonian Day, attendance has dipped 35% from 37,562 to Saturday's 24,521 and live on-track handle has plummeted 62% from $4.4 million to $1,649,385 million.
After taking over the reins at the Meadowlands in January, Gural's first order of business was to build a new grandstand. The current one is too big for his audience, he says.
"You have a building that was built to hold 30,000 people that holds 3,000," Gural said. "No one wants to be at an empty restaurant … or building."
The new grandstand, which will feature a sports bar and V.I.P. areas, is expected to be completed by the end of next year and be ready for racing in 2014.
Before Gural took on the endeavor to turn around the Meadowlands, he built Tioga Downs and bought Vernon Downs, two upstate New York tracks that offer alternative gaming.
"The gaming pays the bills," Gural said. "I love the racing, I go when I can, but by and large, the handle is almost insignificant to the whole operation."
But Gural can't resort to alternative gaming to solve his problems at the Meadowlands because Atlantic City owns exclusive rights to gaming under New Jersey's constitution.
Gov. Chris Christie has adamantly stood by his plan to help Atlantic City recover in five years. He said July 19 the Meadowlands plan to add a casino is "simply not going to happen."
Instead of the casino industry giving the racing industry $30 million to increase purses as it did before 2010-11, this year Christie invested that subsidy in a new marketing plan for Atlantic City.
Gural said it would be easy to tell if Atlantic City can recover after only two years, not five.
"It's inconceivable to me that the customers they had are going to come back," Gural said, "because the customers that they're missing are the weekly people who used to get on buses from northern New Jersey, or Brooklyn or Queens or Manhattan and go to Atlantic City. Most people aren't going to go to Atlantic City now; they are going to go to the closest casino. Other people are going to bet over the phone and on the Internet."
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| Meadowlands |
Meadowlands general manager Mike Newlin came up with the idea of racing ostriches and camels as a gimmick June 15, something he had done while working at another track. The idea worked, as it got more people to the track, but here lies another problem for Newlin and Gural.
"Our research found that last year, 36% of the customers that came through the turnstiles never bought a program," Newlin said. "That's 36% of your customers that have no idea what they're doing. … It's like going to a restaurant and not getting a menu."
To help solve this problem, Newlin is working to educate customers by offering live programs free with admission. No other tracks that he knows of do this, he says.
"I think the big thing for us that makes us competitive is price," Gural said. "We have free parking, on Fridays we have free admission, free program, a hot dog is $2 or something like that. If you want to go to Madison Square Garden, you're going to buy a ticket for $250, you're going to pay $6 for a hot dog."
Although the prices make harness racing a cheap alternative to mainstream sports, 20-year-old driver and lifelong horseman Harry Landy is worried about the state of the sport and its decline in attendance.
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| Jeff Gural |
"I'm hoping they can figure that out, because it's my career," Landy said. "It gives me a little anxiety that I don't know if [harness racing] is going to happen in 15 years. I worked this hard and I didn't go to college.
"The Meadowlands is doing a fantastic job getting people here, but in the end, if you want to mass-produce a lot of people here you need alternative gaming. It's a necessity during this time. In order for this business to thrive, and for farmers to thrive, you need bigger purses. Bigger purses are more handle at the racetracks. In order to get more handle, you need to get more people here."
Don Larson, a 56-year-old harness racing fan from Robbinsville, N.J., agreed with Landy's sentiments and doesn't think the Meadowlands will survive without a casino for five more years.
"Freehold is in trouble and the Meadowlands is in trouble," Larson said. "The purses have gone way down, while Yonkers has casino gambling and the purses higher. They probably get the better horses. You're going to need casino gambling in the racetrack before you can become successful."
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