[trotman]

This I think goes for both the Thoroughbreds and the Standardbreds. The other day I had a conversation with a former race secretary and I brought up the topic of classes or race conditions each race secretary writes for their track. His answer at first was tongue in cheek which was, hell I didn't even know which was which and which horse was stepping up or stepping down. So I said that purses do not tell the story and he said in a perfect world of only straight claimers 5,000 to 10,000 or 15,000 to 7,500 you would have it. He said to me that the conditions each writes should encompass what he has stabled on the backstretch and they try to do that with as little as possible allowances or conditions, but because of sickness and shipping track to track the add on allowances or conditions start to surface, as time goes on the more wilder they get. I showed him a old program from Roosevelt Raceway and inside the cover and the first page was a list of the races carded at the track. It was listed from the very best to the lowest and was a huge help to the fans back then. He was amazed that this track way back when was actually trying to help it's fans and could understand why on any given night it was standing room only. As we kept talking he said if the regulators of racing would just work together then this could be possible for all tracks and then ship in horses could be noted along with what raced there in the program by the rise or drop down. In the end he said in his opinion that we the public would have a better chance playing Russian roulette with 3 bullets than winning on the horses. The complaint about the lotteries and scratch off tickets getting a slice of the pie he said was lame on the racetracks to use that as an excuse. They make the tickets accessible and print the rules and way to play on every ticket. This could take hours what we talked about but in the end he said unless racing takes the first steps to look after their fans and rid the game of the chemist trainers this game will be gone.