By Noah Shachtman

Mr. Shachtman is a contributing editor at Wired. He previously served as the editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast.

• Feb. 28, 2025

One by one, the horses trot up the ramp and onto the track, pulling single-seat chariots behind them. Their drivers, dressed in garish green and bright pink silks, hop into position. Together, they begin to build up speed as they head into the setting sun. The clip-clop of their hooves hitting the track rises to a cacophony. “And they’re off,” the announcer says. The gates swing forward, and the race begins.

Back in the day, when horse racing was the only legal form of gambling in New York State, 20,000 or more people would jam the stands at Yonkers Raceway, cheering wildly as the standardbreds ran their mile-long harness race. But on this day, despite the beautiful July weather, just a few dozen spectators hang around, slumped into faded orange seats along a chain-link fence. Even with online betting, the racetrack takes in less than one-fortieth of what it would have at the sport’s peak. So the horses take their two laps, head back down the runway and exit the track to something near silence.

It’s a lonely time to be a racing fan. For those who own the horses, though, things aren’t so bad. Payouts for winners — the purses — are tremendous, bringing in investors with “both fists full of money,” said Joe Faraldo, the president of the Standardbred Owners Association of New York. Yonkers has purses that are among the largest of any racetrack of its kind, and it still has millions of dollars left over.

If that doesn’t seem to add up, blame a strange and very lucrative arrangement crafted by interests in the horse racing industry (which includes harness racing and its higher-profile sister sport, thoroughbred racing). Back in 2001, when New York State agreed to hand out new licenses to operate slot machines, the racing crowd won an agreement that a chunk of the proceeds would go to them.

At the Yonkers track, the adjacent casino was doing enough business to generate around $600 million during the last fiscal year. About $60 million of it went to pay out those purses, fund the local breeders and dole out a few million for Faraldo’s group. Multiply that by every year and every racetrack, and it’s billions and billions of dollars.

The result is a bizarre inverted pyramid of vice: The state is using one particularly corrosive form of gambling to keep another marginalized form alive.

As misguided as that sounds, it is a surprisingly common arrangement. Maryland uses as much as $91 million a year in slot machine revenue to prop up its horse racing industry. The state last year agreed to acquire the decrepit Pimlico track and invest up to an additional $400 million to upgrade it. Pennsylvania has sunk over $3.5 billion over the past two decades into its racehorse development fund. Even Kentucky, the storied home of American horse racing, relies on a similar machine. Without them, “we would have a few days of racing at Churchill Downs,” Elisabeth Jensen, a former executive at the Kentucky Equine Education Project Foundation, said, “and that would be about it.”

Racing proponents defend that approach, saying the money stimulates a multibillion-dollar equine economy, from the breeders to the trainers to the farmers who grow carrots and hay. Besides, lots of other sports get government subsidies.

t’s true that football and basketball teams get tax incentives, but sports like those have hundreds of millions of fans. The audience for horse racing — except for high-profile events like the Kentucky Derby, which is booming — has plummeted, even as the rise of online gambling has made it easier than ever to place a bet.

Another key distinction: Those other sports don’t routinely kill their athletes. The antiracing advocacy organization Horseracing Wrongs has shown that 11,000 horses have been put to death at American racetracks since 2014. Driven in part by opponents of horse racing and by landmark investigations by The New York Times, a new, federally monitored watchdog has already had a significant impact. Even so, hundreds and hundreds of thoroughbreds still perish each year. In one recent monthlong stretch, 10 thoroughbreds died in New York alone.

As for the jobs that the industry touts, despite recent workplace improvements these workers, many of whom are brought in seasonally from Latin American countries, still in many cases labor seven days a week for minimum wage (when they get it) and sleep in dorms or are jammed into communal apartments. Several told me they had to ride long stretches in the back of a horse trailer with the animals. Over lunch at a Peruvian restaurant near the Belmont track, a half-dozen of these workers told me the racing industry treats its horses with more care than its people. “Mucho más, por cierto,” one said. Much more, for certain. The current political climate is likely to make these workers’ situation more precarious.

Few things are more inspiring than seeing a horse run, and the feelings that these animals evoke in humans can border on the mystic. But that’s neither an economic nor a policy rationale for spending billions on an unpopular sport. So why do it? Why keep propping up a pastime that, despite many attempted overhauls, can’t keep its fans and takes such a heavy toll on its athletes and workers? Our state and local governments struggle to pay teachers what they’re worth, to build affordable housing, to put enough firefighters on a rig.

When the sport was at its peak, the toll it took on horses and workers was measured against the joy it gave millions of fans and the billions it put into states’ coffers. As those fans disappear, however, and the cost to taxpayers grows, that calculus shifts.

With sports betting exploding across the United States, it makes less sense than ever for the public to be coddling this sport like some sort of delicate foundling.

The obvious solution here is also the simplest: Just stop. Let the sport stand on its own and dwindle to whatever size its fan base supports. Instead, state legislatures keep funneling money to it. “The biggest fear that our industry has is that the states are going to stop subsidizing, using slot machines to subsidize the sport,” said Jeff Gural, who owns three harness racing tracks. “Without that, there is no sport.”

Shouldn’t that tell you something?

One hundred and fifty miles due north of Yonkers and seemingly in another world altogether stands Saratoga Race Course. On opening day of the summer meet, you can see all that the sport sees in itself — excitement, prestige and community value. You can also see the kinds of cozy relationships between owners and elected officials that have, for decades running, accompanied such enormous public subsidies.

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More than a million fans a year show up to see Saratoga’s turreted roofs, covered verandas and old-timey jazz quintets. Many of the men are in linen suits; many of the women wear fancy little hats. The local restaurants are packed and hotels are sold out months in advance. “It’s pastoral. It’s historic,” Marc Holliday, chairman of the board of directors for the New York Racing Association, told me that weekend, “and the enjoyment factor is unbelievable.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose husband is a former executive at a conglomerate that owns a New York horse racing track, visited Saratoga just four days into her term, attending the races and a fund-raiser that Mr. Holliday kindly threw on her behalf.

The political connections don’t end there. In the winner’s circle on Opening Day, Terry Finley, the president and chief executive of West Point Thoroughbreds, pointed out to me Barbara Banke, a longtime Republican donor, and mentioned in the next breath that David McCormick, then the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, would be up soon to raise money for his campaign.

Mr. Finley has helped to pioneer a financial arrangement whereby ownership of a thoroughbred can be divided up into shares as small as $15,000. He calls it “the democratization of our business.” One of the results is that while the sport’s fans are dwindling, a new investor class is multiplying and, with it, a political constituency for racing’s huge subsidies.

James Featherstonhaugh is a constituency unto himself. One of the hardest-nosed lobbyists in Albany (where he’s known as “Feathers”), he owns several horses as well as a chunk of a local harness track. When I mention our location, he launches into song: “They’re off, they’re off, they’re off at Saratoga. You’ll see the finest racing anywhere right there!”