"The day-to-day racing at tracks such as Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park is just about as dreary as it was before slots inflated the purses. One track that has made the most of slot money is Woodbine, in Toronto, which offers some of the best daily cards on the continent and uses its resources to promote the sport and to create new horseplayers. But Woodbine is a rarity. More often, slot money props up tracks that have virtually no fan base and couldn’t exist on their own merits."

"The latest news put a big smile on the faces of many a Kentucky owner, trainer, breeder and racetrack operator, but before they go into full celebration mode they ought to take a moment to consider what's going on in Ontario and Pennsylvania. In that state and province, racing is in turmoil and horsemen there realize a lot of that has to do with the many mistakes they made when it comes to racetrack casinos."

"Racetracks that received subsidies from slot machines in 2010 generated on average only two-fifths of the betting that non-subsidized tracks generated even though they distributed nearly equivalent levels of average daily purses, according to unofficial statistics assembled by DRF."

"The sport has had a nice run with slot machines, those gizmos that have fattened purses, made a lot of owners a lot of money and kept a dozen or so racetracks from closing. But the good times are about to end, and a lot sooner than you might have thought."

"Suffolk and Wonderland, which are essentially a single entity, and which have pumped a combined $3 million into gambling lobbying since 2005, are especially troublesome. They’re basically the speaker’s tracks. They’ve long been the odds-on favorites to win a casino license. If they’d won one last year, the deal would have looked wired and unseemly, but also not all that unexpected. Things are different now."

"The top spender was Sterling Suffolk Racecourse, which runs the Suffolk Downs racetrack. The racetrack spent more than $850,000 trying to persuade lawmakers to approve an expanded gambling bill."

"Racing is at a crossroads. One road gives up on racing and stakes the industry’s future on casino games. Many industry leaders are walking down this road. Is it the right road? That depends. If the goal is revenue in the short term, VLTs do the job. But if the goal is making new racing fans, this road leads to extinction. Betting horses and playing casino machines are unrelated activities. VLTs mean empty grandstands."