by Dean A. Hoffman

Dean Hoffman

Columbus, OH — Attendance at harness tracks has been falling for decades and it’s not so easy for tracks to get fans back to the track.

It’s proven much easier to get trainers back to the track.

Gas prices that appear headed for $4/gallon are the primary cause.

Horsemen who preferred to train at a local fairgrounds or farm tracks and ship to race are now finding that it makes far more sense — as in dollars and cents — to stable at the track. The cost of shipping is passed along to owners on the monthly bill, and most owners don’t need any more costs added to their bills.

If you train 50 miles from a track, that’s a 100-mile roundtrip every time a horse qualifies or races. Then you add the costs of tolls and other incidentals and you can easily see why shipping is a growing burden on owners. And horses aren’t shipped in trailers pulled by a Toyota Prius. Pick-ups and horse vans are usually gas guzzlers.

I know of one horseman who has trained and raced off his farm for many years. It’s worked for him. The benefits were primarily to the trainer and his family and the owners understood that they were paying extra over having horses at the track. The “extra,” however, has grown to the point that it doesn’t make sense to incur that expense and have the trainer and his staff spending so much time in trucks — not to mention the stress on the horse.

Years ago, most horses stabled at the tracks if a trainer was lucky enough to get stalls. Some people trained on a farm or a fairgrounds track, but then training centers began to develop in New Jersey in the 1980s when the Meadowlands was flying high and offering jackpot purses.

Some trainers wanted to live away from the track and train close to their home, so training centers in more rural areas of New Jersey became popular. Sure, they charged stall rent when stalls were free at the track, but the Meadowlands money was flowing freely and the trainers felt that the environment was worth the extra cost.

There is always a danger of putting a horse into a truck or trailer subject to the whims of highway safety. Earlier this month you’ll remember the sad saga of K F Trump, who was euthanized after being injured in an accident on the New York Thruway. The trotting mare had been a regular at Yonkers this year.

She’s not the only victim of a shipping accident. Even if horses survive, they are often hurt so badly that it affects their performance. Then there are horses who simply are prone to stress and sickness while being shipped. Oh, sure, it doesn’t happen with every horse or every time you ship, but it does happen.

If your farm or training center is 15 minutes away, perhaps it’s not much of a problem or an expense, but shipping an hour or more can create problems. It’s certainly an additional expense and thus horses stabled away from tracks have to earn more just to stay even with horses stabled on track.

Let’s face it: we all grimace when we fill up our gas tanks. Twenty-five bucks doesn’t go too far these days and the frightening thing is that we may look back on 2008 and regard these as the “good old days.”

Gas prices aren’t at $4/gallon yet, but they’re certainly headed that way. Fuel costs are an increasing concern for horsemen and owners. You can’t pick up racetracks and move them to the horses; the horses have to go to the tracks, and it sure saves owners money if the horse is already stabled at the track.