Horse racing has been in decline for a very long time. It has long been surrounded by controversy and scandals, leading to people boycotting the sport. Most tracks near me have slowly been scaling back their race calendars every year. Is Coronavirus going to be the last nail in the coffin? Tracks are all either shut down, or racing without fans, and I feel many of them will not re-open once the crisis is over.
I doubt it. Its actually still running in parts of America and Australia and the top race horses are owned by very rich people.
Churchill Downs will reopen, I’m sure. I live in Louisville, and the Derby is still a big deal. Well, the pageantry is a big deal. And the pre-Derby festivities.
First post so hello 
The betting industry will dictate the future of horse racing and in reality, will not be bothered (in the short term) if all horse racing is set behind closed doors.
I also live near a racecourse and feel for the locals who must be worrying for their futures.
Hello and welcome!
I agree with you about the betting industry dictating matters here. I think racing will be around for a few decades yet. Animal rights might do it in eventually, as it has with bear baiting, cockfighting, and hunting. I’m not supporting those things nor equating them with racing, I just think that’s the direction society is heading.
There will always be horse racing as long as there are horses and owners - it’s just human nature.
Horse racing isn’t “declining” so much as it is consolidating, and in part, this is because of how much land a race track takes up (not just the track itself, but the grandstands and stable areas). Reducing the number of active tracks not only lets the owners sell to developers willing to pay premium prices for the land (case in point: Bay Meadows), but reduces the amount of “down time” the remaining tracks have. Even at that, I know two tracks - Santa Rosa and Pleasanton - that are dark 48 or 49 weeks out of the year.
For sure it will not. Just like gladiators, people will think it’s more and more inhumane as the world is trending
I will consider this even a remote possibility when all greyhound racing and Spanish/Mexican-style bullfighting (where the bull is killed) is banned.
At least in the U.S., greyhound racing is well on its way to extinction. Wikipedia list only 17 active greyhound tracks in the U.S. (though I don’t know if the list is complete), but it should be noted that nine of those seventeen are in Florida, where the sport will be phased out at the end of this year.
So, as of next year, there’ll apparenty only be eight tracks left in the U.S., in five states.
(I recognize that the US is, of course, not the world. )
The Wiki isn’t current. Several Florida dog tracks have shut down. They planned to later this year but did so early due to the pandemic.
Horse racing, in the U.S., has declined substantially in the past few decades, and a big part of the reason is that there are so many more options for gambling now.
For example, when I moved to Illinois in 1989, there were only two legalized forms of gambling here (other than things like church bingo):
- Horse racing (both thoroughbred and harness)
- State lottery
And, it’s not like Illinois was particularly restrictive about gambling, compared to other states, at that time. Most states didn’t allow casinos (or if they did, it was only tribal casinos), and online wagering was still a long ways off.
Casinos were made legal in Illinois in 1990, video gambling parlors were made legal here in 2012, and sports betting (both on-premise and online) were recently made legal. If someone just wants to gamble, rather than being particularly wedded to betting on horses, that person has a lot more options now.
As a result, the horse racing industry here has shrunk. When I moved here, there were five racetracks in the Chicago area (Arlingon, Balmoral, Hawthorne, Sportsmans, and Maywood); now only Arlington and Hawthorne remain, and my understanding is that both of them have been struggling for years.
That’s true for dog racing, also. In fact, it’s well known that the death of the dog tracks is primarily caused by the proliferation of slot machines. People seem to enjoy them more than betting on the dogs. To compensate for that, in the last few years some state legislatures that supported dog racing passed laws requiring the the dogs be financially supported in some part by the casino revenues. Which annoys some people to no end, and in fact the dog tracks have become a huge financial drain on the casinos. It’s this, more than even the animal welfare issues, that is bringing on the quick death of dog racing in the USA.
My guess is no. Mainly of course because what sustained it, betting, is leaving the track. But also because with the combination of virtually uncontrolled drugging of horses and the alteration of breeding stock to become ever lighter-built for increased speed, the public deaths of so many young thoroughbreds has become a national scandal. The animal rights movement has not been able to crack the omerta code of the race industry to get the drugging controlled, but believe me they are indefatigable, and their goal is to shut it right down. Every horse that goes down on shattered legs on the track is fuel for their campaign.
If racing was made more humane, which would involve just to begin with, a strict no-drug policy and raising the racing age to five years so colts have a fighting change of running on matured legs, it would probably survive as a small niche sport. Those changes would cause the cost from birth to the starting line to maybe double. Guessing.
There used to be a healthy aftermarket for failed race horses (the vast majority) in the eventing/dressage/hunter world, but that has mostly dried up due to a complex of factors, the most important of which is the extreme shrinkage of pleasure horse market over the past forty years.
Some states have riverboat casinos. But they don’t have to be on the river or a boat. 
I think the only requirement is to be within a few miles of a river.
In Illinois, when they first made casino gambling legal, they had to be actual boats (or, at least some sort of floating vessel – some were more like barges with buildings atop them). Some were on rivers, but at least one proposed one would have fundamentally been in a man-made pond.
Also, they had to remain “cruising” (i.e., not at the dock) for several hours at a time. This was intentional, to limit how often people could enter, but it eventually became a competitive disadvantage compared for the Chicago-area riverboats when Indiana changed their laws, and said that the riverboats could just stay moored. So, the law was pretty quickly changed, and now some of the casinos here aren’t boats at all.