Suckers & Statistics

No crowd, from the stable owners and boxholders to the people in the infield, is tougher than the one at Saratoga. No officials are more officious, no bookmakers more sinister.* But Saratoga, oldest and physically most beautiful U. S. track, considers itself the musnud of U. S. horse racing. As its annual month of races and sales drew to a close last week, Saratoga was loyally if obliquely defended against the encroachments of newer horse parks by one of its most representative habitues.

Richest Saratoga stake is the Hopeful ($25,000 guaranteed). Of recent years, newer tracks have made a practice of publicizing themselves and attracting famous thoroughbreds by posting immense added prizes for handicaps. The three-year-old Santa Anita (Calif.) track currently gives the biggest, $100,000. Suffolk Downs (Mass.) and Narragansett Park (R. I.), both comparatively new plants, plan equal purses next season. To make sure that great horses will enter these races, handicappers at new tracks narrow the limits of weights imposed on the entries, so that a very good horse need not carry much more poundage than a horse whose form is far less impressive. Through the sparkling spectacles of stern young John Hay ("Jock") Whitney--who, as a New York State racing commissioner, Jockey Club member, president of the American Thoroughbred Breeders Association and scion of a great U. S. turf family, typifies Saratoga's rich and formidable August colony--this seems a piece of gross misdoing. In the breakfast room of the gargantuan old Grand Union Hotel* last week he rose to address the convened National Association of State Racing Commissioners on this subject:

"When a track wants to create a splash, or finds the abundance of its revenue embarrassing, it puts on a 'handicap.' The $50,000 or the $100,000 invariably is added to the handicap--and what a handicap! . . . One after another, leading race tracks are adopting as their stellar attraction [this] form of race, started not so many years ago by certain trainers whose horses were of such popularity that terms could be demanded prior to the publication of the conditions. It is called a handicap, but it certainly is not an open handicap, and I have tried to think of a name with which to characterize this outrageous travesty on the turf's great races. There is only one--the sucker handicap. The size of the stake is so great and the possibilities of something happening in any big race so ever present, that owners of horses without a possible chance at the weights are lured into competition by a beautiful optimism. . . . "

What Mr. Whitney would like to see more of, he said, was weight-for-age races (Saratoga puts on three of the nation's four) which would encourage owners of good older horses, who are usually handicapped out of racing by the time they are four or five years old, to keep them in training.

Another Saratoga frequenter is Herbert Bayard Swope. No scion but a clever Manhattan journalist, Mr. Swope began participating in the gay sporting life of Saratoga soon after the turn of the Century. He was, in fact, Arnold Rothstein's best man when that notorious and ill-fated gambler married a show girl at the spa in the summer of 1909. Nowadays Mr. Swope is chairman of the New York State Racing Commission, and as such delivered last week some interesting statistics on the U. S. racehorse business.

Mr. Swope estimated the total investment in U. S. thoroughbred racing at $125,000,000, on which more than $10,000,000 a year is paid in taxes. Last year 10,757 horses started in 15,344 races on 2,033 racing days. Averaged roughly at $1,000 apiece, these horses were worth $10,757,000. Breeding stock represents about $10,000,000 more and the 5,000 thoroughbreds foaled annually on U. S. farms are worth $5,000,000. Last year U. S. tracks distributed $12,994,605 in prize money. This was a daily average of $6,391. Belmont Park offered the richest total with a daily average of $14,191. Saratoga came second with $13,700 and Arlington Park third with $12,603.

* Last week William Woodward's two-year-old Fighting Fox, full brother of famed Gallant Fox, won the 35th running of the Grand Union Hotel Stakes, by a length and a half. It was his first start.

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