The Alan Balch Column - Future?

According to etymologists, the word “future” only dates to the 1300s.

Human life up to then, I guess, must have been so “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (to copy the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ description of life outside society), that humanity could scarcely conceive of the very idea of a “future.”

If we could envision the concept of a future, I reason, we would have had a word for it.

This surprises me, since like so many other things it invented, horse racing may itself have started the first intense debates about what “the future” holds:  according to the latest Artificial Intelligence, there was gaming on the races as far back as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.  Way, way before the 14th century.

You have to understand the concept of “future” if you’re betting on an outcome that hasn’t yet occurred.  Our entire sport, one might say, is “future-oriented.”  If we knew with certainty what a result would be, we would have no game.  And far, far less fun.

Just ask everyone who went against the bridge jumpers who bet the ranch on that 1-9 shot to show . . . which then didn’t.

Or, ask the breeders.  They “breed the best to the best and hope for the best,” the aphorism often attributed to John E. Madden.  Yes, that family . . . of Hamburg Place in Kentucky.

So, “future-orientation” is the foundation of horse racing in many respects, beginning with breeding.  It’s also something I deeply considered in my last school days, and again in my early days of race track marketing at Santa Anita, more than half a century ago.  

One of my teachers, Edward Banfield, wrote a controversial book, The Unheavenly City, in which he argued that social class distinctions in human society are not determined by heritable biological traits such as race, or similarities among income, occupations, schooling, or status.  Those had been almost universally understood to cause classes among people, and it’s probably still a consensus.  Instead, he held, a person’s class is determined by a “psychological orientation toward the future,” that is to say, whether a person is more or less oriented toward the future or the present.  The more future-oriented, in his view, the “higher class.”

Gamblers, I found out through research, tend to be “present-oriented.”  Tend to live “moment to moment.”  And I saw this constantly throughout the race track, whether in the exclusive areas with dress codes for the ultra-wealthy, or on the grandstand main floor at the wire, where the blue-collar crowd congregated.  Occupation, race, appearance, and income varied absurdly – the present-oriented bettors want action, now!  Immediate gratification.

Banfield believed instead that a person’s relation to time gave them their “class culture,” which in turn then influenced their tastes and behavior.

Thoroughbred breeders are required by laws of nature to be future-oriented (mares requiring almost a year for gestation, added to the time necessary for planning matings); yet breeding is also, by definition, high-risk.  Risk abounds everywhere else in racing, too.  Isn’t this among the seductive allures and fascinations and contradictions racing provides, like no other sport? 

In my track-management decades, the public companies I worked for always confronted the tension between earnings-per-share-this-quarter vs. investing for future growth.  We couldn’t escape public disclosure of our audited financials, whether for shareholders or regulators.  The discipline this required of California track management, unfortunately, seems to be a thing of the past, over more than the last two decades.

And the result looks increasingly catastrophic.

Every decision that any track management makes has to account for the size of the horse population available to race.  This should go without saying -- but in California, it doesn’t!  Management can announce the end of racing at a track which undergirds most of a state’s breeding, apparently without understanding or considering the consequences, not only for every other connected enterprise in the state, but also for itself.  And without any objective evidence of the basis for its financial decision-making.

And, if it did understand or consider those consequences of its decisions, ponder the implications of having made them anyway.

In the 2025 Santa Anita meet which ended in June, California-breds accounted for just under half of all starts, an all-time high.  As of May this year, not coincidentally, horses bred in California were over 51% of the total population stabled in the south, including 60% of the population at Los Alamitos.  Every one of those was bred while year-around racing was conducted at Golden Gate Fields and the fairs in Northern California – where over 70% of starters were bred in the state.

As the North American foal crop has steadily declined, according to The Jockey Club Fact Book, the Kentucky share has been rising, to nearly 50% now.  The California, Florida, and other shares, for the most part, have been declining precipitously.  The implications of this are ominous for the geography of American racing as it has existed for nearly a century.

What the future holds will always be as mysterious as peering out into the vast universe with stark wonder.  And all of us in racing know better than the rest of the world, and every investor, that “past performance is not indicative of future results.”

In our own California case, however, past performance has brought us to an exceptionally precarious position.