What do we have to lose?
by Trey Nosrac
Pari-mutuel wagering has funded the sport of harness horse racing all of our lives. When anyone suggests that wagering may not be the primary driver in the future, it is human nature to be skeptical. Discussion about new ways to race horses feels dangerous. But avoiding the future carries far more danger.
The question about the future of our beloved sport might be better framed as whether we can survive without imagining something different than our past. The new wide world of gambling has shifted everything. Recently, there was a wagering proposition on the exact day our nation would go to war. Consider a few additional vignettes.
The Cleveland Guardians found their team gutted when it was alleged that their star pitcher intentionally threw baseballs outside the strike zone, and gamblers wagered heavily on those errant pitches.
An NBA player was banned for life after investigations showed he shared confidential health information with bettors and manipulated his own court performance to benefit large wagers placed by accomplices.
A 2025 Turkish football betting scandal had dozens of suspects, players, club officials, and referees arrested in connection with allegations of fixing match outcomes for betting advantages. Among those detained were prominent players who were accused of influencing match events tied to specific betting markets.
These wagers do not have a takeout or expenses. Their infrastructure could be a basement in Bar Harbor or a condo in Capistrano. Reining in the gambling mania will be impossible. Our particular corner of the gambling market – a cumbersome, state-based pari-mutuel system and the costly economics associated with it, does not look like a growth industry.
There are countless new competitors for gambling dollars. New gambling businesses are powerful and ruthless and are here to stay. There is no sense in complaining or fighting to go back to yesterday. All we can do is adjust.
Horse racing is no longer proprietary in the gambling world. In a world of artificial intelligence, any slice of the population that wants to wager on a horse race will look for a moneyman without baggage or takeout. If horse racing survives, you want to make a wager, and the takeout is one per cent versus 20 per cent, where are you placing your assets?
Silent killers in harness horse racing are not a lack of passion, talent, hard work, or horses. They are expenses and overhead. Layers of overhead were built for a gambling ecosystem that leads to frustrating whack-a-mole regulation and constraining new initiatives.
We could transition to a private sport that does not rely on gambling. Consider the expenses we could save:
• No race office
• No judges or full-time officials
• No state regulators on site
• No licensing (horses, trainers, drivers, owners)
• No ship-in barns
• No detention barns or spit boxes
• No testing personnel
• No testing labs, shipping, or chain-of-custody costs
• No legal retainers or litigation reserves
• No compliance departments, minimal security
• No tractor-trailers or shipping fleets
• No massive fuel bills and pollution
• No insurance premiums tied to gambling operations
• No tote systems
• No tote boards
• No grandstands
• No data feeds that we sell back to ourselves
• No mandated race-day ratios
• No appeals process
• No intermediaries handling our money
Industries that survive disruption shed weight. Airlines cut meals. Newsrooms cut printing presses. Music cuts CDs. Our sport, for the most part, continues running in the same old circles.
If people find the formula to remove gambling from the center of the sport and implement a private model, the incentive structure changes. A self-contained, invitational, private racing environment does not mean there is no money on the table for your racehorse. Rather, we create our own financial incentive structure for the participants.
This environment does not mean the wild west; it means being privately regulated. Peer accountability replaces bureaucratic enforcement. Reputation replaces punishment. Participation replaces compliance. If we let go of a gambling mentality, harness racing will offer a cleaner, fairer, more wholesome product.
A cleaner, smaller, transparent sport built for participants is far easier to re-monetize than a bloated relic gasping for subsidies. We are racing towards something. Maybe in the future we can squeeze some revenue from the wagering public – but we cannot bet on it.
Harness racing will survive not by betting on gambling, but by betting on itself.
