The battle over membership in the NTRA comes at inopportune time for racing

Breeders' Cup championship day is usually reserved for showcasing the best racing has to offer. This year, it helped showcase the worst racing has to offer, divisiveness in the industry.

In the days leading up to the Breeders' Cup at Churchill Downs, the focus off the track was on the defection of 22 racetracks from the National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA). Just days before the big event, news came from the NTRA that a bloc of East Coast racetracks and racetracks owned by Magna Entertainment Corp. would be opting out of the NTRA at the renewal deadline of November 10. To its credit, the NTRA did not attempt to hide the issue, but the timing could not have been more inopportune.

Hovering over the gray skies at Churchill on November 4 was the specter of a possible setback to the future viability of the NTRA, an organization that was formed to promote racing on this very day. The loss of 22 tracks will reduce the annual operating revenues of an organization already struggling financially.

At issue for some of the disaffected parties is the NTRA's relationship with TVG (Television Games Network). For others, it was the NTRA's general direction.

A four-hour meeting was held on November 9, one day before the deadline for tracks to sign up for 2001, between some of the executives of the disenfranchised tracks and Tom Meeker, Churchill's chief executive officer who was acting as a mediator on behalf of the NTRA. The meeting did not produce any immediate result of bringing tracks back into the NTRA fold and now only an extension of the deadline can avoid loss of member tracks.

Much of the criticism of the disaffected track owners is directed at Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna Entertainment, which owns seven tracks, including Santa Anita Park and Gulfstream Park.

While a majority of the Mid-Atlantic tracks that are dissatisfied with the NTRA are so based on the NTRA's affiliation with TVG, for his part, Stronach has indicated that he would consider bringing Magna's tracks back into the fold should the NTRA adopt some of his suggestions. His problem with the NTRA, he said, is not TVG but how the NTRA is governed and its mission statement.

Stronach is asking for open elections of the board of directors of the NTRA, wants to see a specific mission statement and business plan to guide the future of the organization, and wants the NTRA to adopt a "free enterprise" policy for racing. By that he means removing the restrictions on when a racetrack can operate its meetings, with competition within each state deciding survival of the fittest.

These all seem to be reasonable demands, though the latter suggestion is something that only a state racing commission can address, since commissions award racing dates. Stronach, however, is asking that the NTRA be involved with lobbying on the state level to get legislatures to relax regulations and taxes on racing. Stronach has made this suggestion before, at this time last year when he threatened to pull the Magna tracks from the NTRA.

Stronach's suggestion that the NTRA develop a strategic plan for the future is something the organization should have as a matter of normal business practice. While the NTRA will point out that it has a business plan, that is not the same as a strategic plan. What the NTRA needs to disseminate to everyone in racing who financially supports it is a plan that indicates what it will accomplish in terms of increasing attendance, handle, and visibility of the sport, how it will accomplish it, the time it will take to accomplish it, and the benefits that the industry will derive from successfully fulfilling its mission.

Final resolution of the impasse between the NTRA and the 22 tracks is yet to be determined. What is apparent is that the deadline must be changed.

Since the NTRA has gone to a calendar fiscal year, it should finalize its budget much earlier, not six weeks before the start of the year. A summer date for committing to the NTRA should be used, when companies are planning their budgets. This would avoid what promises to be an annual sideshow that unnecessarily distracts attention from the Breeders' Cup.