Shutdown hits Woodbine track staff hard

No racing means no betting and no money

The feeling around Woodbine Racetrack these days, other than a growing sense despair and hopelessness, is: ‘Why them and not us?’

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdowns, there’s no racing, so there’s no money. A great many track workers are unemployed and are struggling to pay rent, to buy food, even to find a place to live. Most of those people don’t make a lot of money when they are working. They have no savings, nothing to fall back on, few other work skills.

These aren’t the people who are working from their home offices, ordering food and booze online and taking time out to go on social media and lecture others about social distancing and staying home. These are people who, if they’re not at the track working, they’re busted. These are the people who are worried, deeply worried, that their industry is on the brink of collapse.

“People are scared,” said owner and horse player Tommy Massis. “People are going to go out of business.”

And yet, there are tracks in North America — Gulfstream Park, Tampa Bay Downs, Oaklawn, Will Rogers Downs, for instance — as well as tracks in Australia, Japan and Hong Kong, that are up and running and functioning somewhat normally, with strict social distancing in place and with no spectators in the stands. Grooms, hot walkers, trainers, jockeys and owners at these tracks are making money and, more importantly, staying afloat.

At Woodbine, people are desperate for racing to begin — desperate to work, desperate for, at the very least, an opening date they can focus on. The 2020 thoroughbred season at Woodbine was set to begin on April 18. That’s been postponed indefinitely. As of now, only essential workers are allowed at the Woodbine backstretch, to care for the horses.

Nobody wants to put other people in danger and spread the COVID-19 virus. But for some track people on the brink of financial collapse, there’s a growing feeling that the cure can’t be worse than the disease, particularly if there are steps that can be taken to limit the risk of contracting or spreading the virus. Already, workers arriving at the backstretch have their temperature taken and go through a series of health checks.

“The fact that Gulfstream and Oaklawn and Tampa are still going, how does that work?” prominent Woodbine trainer Julia Carey asked. “Why can’t we not operate in the same way that Gulfstream does? Everyone is fine. Everyone’s making money. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for the city. The government doesn’t have to support these people.

“(Workers) are there anyway (caring for the horses in the backstretch), there’s only a few people extra that would be coming to work (when racing begins) and they could easily work in an isolated environment where they wouldn’t be contaminating each other in any work. It could work. It has worked,” Carey added.

“When you look at the situation in the U.S. and our situation here in Ontario, the two don’t look comparable, yet the tracks in the U.S. are fighting through and some smaller tracks are even taking advantage of the situation in the sense that their daily handle are at numbers never seen,” added Kevin Attard, another prominent trainer at Woodbine. “And we’re here wondering, when?”

Horse racing is a professional sport that doesn’t benefit from lucrative TV contracts and there’s no promise of a big-money payout from a network when the next season begins. If there’s no racing, there’s no betting and there’s no money.

Woodbine CEO Jim Lawson is desperate for racing to begin and he’d love to be able to announce a start date for the 2020 season. But he believes it’s wrong to throw out a random date and give people false hope.

One thing that scares people in the horse racing industry — and it makes the current situation even tougher to bear — is that a great many people don’t care if the sport dies. Horse racing has been plagued with problems for years, most recently doping scandals and far too many horses dying under mysterious circumstances at some U.S. tracks.