Wow, this animal lover is having a GREAT week! First, I am encouraged that pandemic fears might cause people to decrease their consumption of pork, and now you tell me that this cruel, stupid "sport of kings" is on its way out. If tomorrow I were to read that the red states started enforcing the cockfighting ban, my week would end with a perfect trifecta.

It's very hard to be a fan of a sport whose stars compete for a total of approximately 8 minutes a year. Racehorses today run infrequently and the Derby winner who runs after age 3 is now a rarity. Where's the fun in following a sport when the celebrities get rushed off to the breeding shed the second they indicate they're any good?

To make matters worse, handicapping is probably more difficult than any other kind of gambling. It requires math skills, an understanding of the running styles of the entrants in a race and creative thinking in picturing how a race might "set up." Good handicappers can spend hours preparing to wager a single race.

So you have a sport that takes a lot of smarts to wager successfully and in which the really good athletes compete maybe ten times over two years for two minutes at a time. Is it any wonder it can't keep an audience?

That said, Friesan Fire.

Considering he's beaten the favorite multiple times (along with other wiseguy types like Papa Clem & Chocolate Candy) and otherwise done nothing wrong, I'm a bit bemused that Pioneer of the Nile is being overlooked everywhere. I hope it holds true at the windows, since that's where my money is going. Friesan Fires has a good chance, though, especially if it continues to rain.

My father worked in Cicero and loved to play the ponies. I still remember him carrying The Green Sheet around and sitting on the couch after dinner sometimes listening to a portable transistor radio for the the race results.

"But slots or no, the whole horse-racing industry is reeling."

In fact just today Hollywood Park had to cancel their race card because of a lack of entrants.

Anyway good article Edward but personally I'm looking at Dunkirk a little differently. Gomez had his choice for the Derby and opted for Pioneer of the Nile. Anyone can make a misjudgement but generally you don't become leading rider by not figuring out which colt is ready to move up. There aren't any monsters this year and I'm not sold on I Want Revenge. I'm looking at Pioneer, Friesan Fire, and both the Goldophin runners as well as Papa Clem and maybe West Side Bernie for a piece of the tri and superfecta. There isn't a lot of speed this year which puts Regal Ransom and Friesan Fire on or up close to a moderate pace. There's a rain system stalled over the South so it may be a wet track with lots of horses getting mud kicked in their faces for the first time, so being in front will be that much more important. I expect Desert Party to show enough speed from his outside post to be only five or six lengths back going into the first turn. Papa Clem's coming up to a big race and West Side Bernie at probably around 50/1 could save ground at the rail and -- muddy-faced or not -- grind out a third or fourth. Good luck.

Well written. Only an experienced handicapper could have summarized it that way. The only thing you left out is the burdensome 25% take-out you're subjected to if all your analysis pays off enough to warrant a trip to the IRS window. Not to mention the track take beforehand. If they attempted to do that to every pile of poker chips in a card game there wouldn't be a card player who would stand for it.

Sportsman's Park also sometimes offered another attraction besides horses or boxing: God. Periodically the Chicago area Jehovah's Witnesses would rent the track on a Sunday during the offseason to hold mass worship services, setting up an altar and pulpit in the infield and packing the stands with the faithful. It was cheap, there were plenty of bathrooms, and the track was only a few blocks from the Elevated station. How the Witnesses dealt with the fact that they surely did not approve of gambling I don't know, but this was an annual feature for many years.

Horse racing may not rank up there with factory farming and cosmetics testing when it comes to cruelty to animals, but it is rife with cruelty and abuse, from broken limbs to doping to the selling of horses to slaughterhouses. An activity that involves gambling and big money and animals is a recipe for cruelty and exploitation. So yes, if horse racing disappears, then I say: good riddance, what took so long?

When I was in college working at the Cleveland Press in 1982, I remembered all of the horse racing results I would format for the evening paper. Sportsman's Park was one of them. There was a real interest in the results. As a matter of fact, one part of my training was to give the results hot off the wire to a 'connected' gentleman who would call in for them. How connected was he? After a few weeks of giving him what he wanted, he told me he could get me a pair of seats to any concert I wanted - and good seats too. Those were the days.

I got the horse right here

The name is Paul Revere

And here's a guy that says that the weather's clear

Can do, can do, this guy says the horse can do

If he says the horse can do, can do, can do.

Years later on my way to Midway airport (late 1990s-early 2000s), I'd get off the Stevenson at Cicero and there was a hotel that was built for the horse racing crowd off the exit. Let's just say it was obvious when the park closed but the motel was already seedy and run down by the late 90s.

Here we have Thistledown, another struggling track that has seen much better days. A night at the races was really quite a date one time. You mention going to the track to anyone under 40 today and they think you're talking about NASCAR. Horse racing? They still do that?

At the same time horse racing agate in the paper started it's decline, so did bowling scores. Culturally, I think there might have been a connection. I used to spend untold hours manually entering in bowling scores for two newspapers. Now, 20+ years later, I can't even find bowling scores in the local paper most of the time. These were places you went to be part of a crowd having a good time - there was more public interaction at both places. About all that's left is professional sports and that's both more expensive and anonymous nowadays. People stay home and watch TV.