In championship races, how much should handle matter?

by Brett Sturman 

In the period of two weekends, both thoroughbred and harness racing year-end championships were conducted. The Breeders’ Cup World Championships took place last weekend at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, KY, while the Breeders Crown was contested the weekend prior at Scioto Downs in Columbus, OH.

Though for entirely different reasons, one commonality between the two events was a precipitous drop in handle from prior years. It does raise the question; how much should handle count when deciding where a championship goes, and how much these days does it ever matter?

Beginning briefly with the thoroughbreds, handle for the two Breeders’ Cup days at Keeneland was $167.9 million, down 6.7 per cent from last year’s event at Del Mar. This year’s handle was the lowest handle since the COVID-impacted event in 2020.

The lower handle can’t be attributed to Keeneland directly as a hosting facility however, because in 2022, the highest handle ever for the Breeders’ Cup came when it was hosted at Keeneland. This year’s lower handle has widely been attributed to underwhelming undercards combined with some shorter fields. Wagering on the actual Breeders’ Cup races themselves were just about on par with last year’s. As such, the wagering aspect of things wasn’t a verdict on Keeneland.

Things take a much different shape when reviewing the Breeders Crown numbers.

Before I even get into it, none of the coming commentary is a knock on the job that all those did in putting together this year’s event. From everything I have seen, the event, particularly on the Saturday card, was well attended with highly competitive racing and overall ran a well-regarded two-day event. The weekend did Ohio proud.

That said, to compare change in handle as the Breeders Crown moves between venues is a completely reasonable discussion, and one that shouldn’t be shied away from.

Sadly, no official handle numbers were cited for this year in any published releases, but here are my unofficial numbers taken from charts in the days after the races. Friday’s card with four Breeders Crown races handled under $1 million, and Saturday’s card with eight Breeders Crown races handled $1.85 million.

For reference, the 2025 Breeders Crown held at Woodbine Mohawk Park handled $5.69 million over their two days, and in 2024 The Meadowlands handled $7.73 million for Breeders Crown weekend. What it amounts to is approximately a 65 per cent drop in handle between the races two years ago at The Meadowlands and this year’s event. No matter how you look at it, that’s a significant change.

Now, your response might be, so what, or who cares about handle anymore.

If you think that, you’re not entirely wrong, sadly but true. Today, the success of events isn’t measured by handle.

But where handle does matter is that it’s really the only proxy that we have for knowing who actually even cares about the races. What other way is there to measure interest?

The Meadowlands went head-to-head with Scioto over Breeders Crown weekend, running the same number of races, and rotating race-by-race with each other over the course of the weekend. Over that time, The Meadowlands handled $3.8 million for the weekend to Scioto’s let’s call it $2.7 million. Even on Saturday, with the massive Scioto card and the weight of the industry behind it, The Meadowlands, while running a card of predominantly $7,500 claimers, had a higher handle.

Here’s one more instance. On the Friday event, race 7 at The Meadowlands was an all-ladies race of which most lady drivers were amateurs, and race 7 at Scioto was a 2-year-old Breeders Crown race. More money was wagered on the lady amateurs at The Meadowlands than the race with the top barns, top drivers, and 2-year-old royalty at the Breeders Crown.

Taken literally, more people cared about the amateur race at The Meadowlands than a Breeders Crown final. I don’t know if that’s the reality, but it is what the numbers say. How else is there to interpret it?

Again, I’ll grant that handle isn’t everything. These days it might hardly be anything in the overall scheme of things. And there is a valid argument to be made in taking the Breeders Crown on the road and exposing the best of what harness racing has to offer to new regions. There is real value in that.

There are other economics too. The Hambletonian Society partners with these host tracks and receives various types of financial commitments and sponsorships, but at what point does handle outweigh all the other intangibles? Even if handle doesn’t matter like it used to, it still is the best way to measure interest in events, and maximizing a global interest must still be a top priority.

We know this exact scenario will play out next summer when the Hambletonian debuts at Harrah’s Hoosier Park. Handle at Hoosier isn’t likely to match handle from the event at The Meadowlands, but that won’t solely determine the success of the event.

The Breeders Crown at Scioto showed that a track can make an event matter to people locally, even if the betting public is slow to adapt. Weighing those two together should be a conversation the sport should have openly.