The big news in horse racing land the past week was not the Florida or Arkansas Derby, Repole fighting a two front war while trying to run a football league, or even salt-of-the-earth Marcus Hersh getting flamed on the twitter. It was, of course, the huge news about TVG.
- FanDuel TV will reduce its workforce by about 60 percent at the end of June, after honoring commitments to Keeneland and Triple Crown coverage. The remaining employees will continue through the end of November.
Horse racing is a tight community, and I, like many of you, have chatted with TVG folks over the many years. This clearly sucks. For them mostly, but for us and for the sport in general.
What irks me to no end, quite frankly, is hearing people profess about how inevitable this all is. That horse racing is yesterday's sport and that it's a complete eventuality it all goes away.
That, in my humble opinion, is a pile of horse shit.
Back in 2012 Kodak went under, years after controlling 80% of the film market.
Old-school film was replaced by digital, as we all know, and off they went into the sunset. But Kodak's folding wasn't inevitable either.
Kodak had a massive revenue edge, with money sitting in a bank account to invest.
Kodak knew about digital and had the technology right under their roof before many others, but they failed to do anything about it. They held the skeleton key to the disruption that was coming, but they didn't have the courage to disrupt themselves.
They rested on what they had, while the customer was telling them they weren't liking what they were offering. They chose legacy over responsiveness and agility.
In our sport, we have been gifted billions upon billions of dollars through slots and legislation, and we've watched - meet after meet, month after month, year after year - demand crater, without diversifying and investing where it was most-needed.
We can complain about the CDI Death Star getting their cut and spending it on historical racing machines and casinos and stock buybacks and making Arlington Park a parking lot, but they're a private company; they're not responsible for the sport. The other half of the slot money went to the various alphabets; they're ones who are tasked with caring about it.
In our sport, the ubiquitous alphabets knew what was coming - sports betting, digital casinos and everything else we can bet on, including if the President will have a ham sandwich for lunch tomorrow.
How did they prepare for this, no less while they were given a monopoly on online wagering for years? I'll wait for your answer.
Kodak (and others) taught us that new technology is important, right? Today, all we read about is Kalshi and Polymarket. They're everywhere, they are the AI of bubbles, the cocaine that fueled the cocaine bear; they're hotter than an otter's pocket.
Well, TVG is owned by the company that owned the world's biggest, best and most used prediction market - Betfair. To add insult to injury, in 2012, California passed legislation granting monopoly power to racing for exchange wagering/prediction markets.
If you didn't know that, you read it right. If the sport acted on this 14 years ago, instead of holding on to what it had, scared of "cannibalizing win pools" or whatever else it used to excuse and encourage their paralysis, the private equity folks and the Trump kids would be coming to this sport - horse racing - for a piece of the action.
Imagine that. Horse racing - you and me, and the grooms, the hotwalkers, the TVG cameraman, the trainers and owners and everyone else - would get a slice of every settled bet wagered for who is going to win the Super Bowl, or what square-jawed, creatine filled headshot king is leaving the Bachelorette next.
So, yes, it disturbs me that a sport with billions in wagering, with billions in purses, with billions of slot money, with hundreds of thousands of participants and fans and bettors; and farmers, and vets and vet techs and farriers and feedmen, has been represented so poorly.
And to hear over and over again that this was all "inevitable"?
Give me a freaking break.
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