Horse racing: sport of kings and guys with bad comb-overs chewing cheap cigars. But young people? Nah. Who under the age of Oscar Madison would hit Belmont on a Fourth of July holiday? What are the odds that New Yorkers who have not yet rounded the clubhouse turn of middle age would consider the track a fun, hip destination? Sucker's bet. Long shot at best.
And yet, there it was, a small but visibly youthful contingent choosing to celebrate a vacation day at Belmont Park playing the ponies. Some wore jacket and tie and sipped bloodies in the air-conditioned, moneyed comfort of the Belmont Room. Others sweated it out on the rail, pulling beers out of coolers and keeping toddlers from straying onto the turf.
Spend a day at the races, and it's clear that the sport still has a few kinks to straighten out, image-wise. But the New York Racing Association, under its new leadership, is trying.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"Looking for a great filly?" says an ad that started running this summer in magazines like Time Out New York and Gotham and in The New York Observer. "Try dangerous curves in the 8th at Belmont." Besides the fillies, the ad features a model who bears a passing resemblance to Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Happy hour destination
Last month, the fashion and trends Web site Daily Candy and Z-100 radio sponsored a "Hot to Trot Crush Brunch" at Belmont. Foll-owing the lead of other tracks around the country, "Sunset" racing on Fridays starts at 3pm instead of 1pm, with the idea of making it a happy-hour destination for New Yorkers en route to the Hamptons.
A junior committee hopes to lure horsy young swells, 20-somethings with roman numerals after their names, some of whose grandparents and great-grandparents can be seen posing with cups and horseflesh in the fading black-and-white photographs on the clubhouse walls.
"Horse racing used to be like the premier thing to go to," said Ogden Phipps II, 24, who started the junior committee and comes from a long line of racing people. "There was a certain buzz around it, an aura. It was a very elegant thing to do."
That was a while ago. Barry K. Schwartz, who took over as chairman and chief executive of the New York Racing Association in October, wants to bring back the buzz, or at least get rid of the stigma.
"It used to be that people were embarrassed to say they were going out to the track," said Schwartz, himself a breeder of horses. "You said you wanted to go to the track -- you didn't say it too loud."
Promoting racing
Schwartz, who in his spare time is chairman of Calvin Klein Inc, would like to make racing as fashionable as his other business -- or at least give it back some of the style it had in the days of Man o' War and Seabiscuit.
To that end, Schwartz is drawing on his fashion and social connections.
Madonna Badger -- whose ad agency, Badger Kry & Partners, is behind the television and print campaign and a new Belmont logo -- used to work at Calvin Klein.
A former Calvin Klein public relations man, Paul Wilmot, is in charge of publicity for the racing association's junior committee, whose fashionista members include Eliza Reed Bolen, Emilia Fanjul, Samantha Phipps and Cornelia Guest.
In May, they held a kickoff party at Lotus, the downtown nightclub, and on June 7 considerably reduced the average age of the Belmont Ball, held on the eve of the Belmont Stakes, the last leg of the Triple Crown.
Badger, a Kentuckian who grew up going to the Derby, said her ads have to combat horse racing's less than glamorous image.
"It has this sort of pallor on it," she said. "Old guys and cheap rye and that whole thing. I wanted to give a feeling of sexuality. It's about fun, it's about being young. It's about being alive."
Judging from the Fourth of July at Belmont, it's also still very much about old guys and cheap rye.
Random sightings during the afternoon included a deeply tanned Jimmy the Greek type in a white tracksuit liberally unzipped to reveal several gold chains nesting in chest hair the color of Grecian Formula, many pairs of huge tinted glasses, cigars the size of Wiffle bats and enough rugs to fill a showroom at ABC Carpet.
Not that you'd want to lose those guys, or have them all replaced by day-tripping 20-somethings. But upstairs in the Belmont Room -- a private dining room for association trustees, owners, trainers and their guests -- the young swells kept well away from Messrs Hoi and Polloi. A table of them giggled over US$5 and US$10 bets: young men in pinstripes and Hermes ties, women in bobs and pearls.
As Jared Lewis, 24, a manager at Trattoria dell'Arte, who was wearing yellow pants, said: "You're either in here or you're out there. You wouldn't necessarily want to be rubbing elbows with everybody out there."
From across the table, Walter Tomenson III, 24, a jovial insurance executive, said he started going to the track a couple of years ago because he had friends among the people who formed the junior committee. He now goes a few times a year.
"People are realizing it's not just guys with their pension checks hanging on the rail yelling, `Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!"' Tomenson said. "You have some cocktails, get into the gambling. It's a fun way to spend the day."
Many of the Belmont Room crowd also plan to take in the races in Saratoga in August. Melanie Charlton, who is on the junior committee and whose boyfriend is a big polo player, wants to link the polo and racing scenes into a month's festival of equestrian chic.
"They wanted the young crowd of people who are cool and hip," she said of her mandate as a committee member. At Belmont "they've had drools of models," she said, meaning, uh, a lot. Carmen Kass for instance. "There's definitely some walls that need to be broken down."
How do hard-core racing fans feel about their sport's aspirations to trendiness? Steven Crist, the publisher of Daily Racing Form, sounded somewhat nonplussed.
"At no time has it been a popular activity with people in their 20s," he said. "It requires disposable time and disposable income, which is not in real strong supply with that age group."
"Look at newspaper clippings from 50 years ago," he said, "and you will find fulminating about the lack of young people at the track."
Popularity dropping
Still, racing's popularity has dropped strikingly over the last generation. Schwartz said a typical Saturday at Belmont in the 1960s might have drawn 50,000 fans. Now it's 15,000 to 20,000 is a decent day. On the Fourth, he estimated the crowd at about 18,000.
Crist said he was surprised by the number of young society people at the Belmont Ball this year, an event that he called "kind of moribund" in recent years. Saratoga was dead 25 years ago, he said, but "now it's become such a Hamptons destination thing." The same cannot be said for other New York tracks.
"Go to Saratoga, and you'd think racing is the hottest thing in the world," he said. "Go to Aqueduct in February, and you'd think racing's dead."
Down by the rail at Belmont is definitely not a Hamptons thing, though Schwartz has replaced the old blacktop with a classier brick surface. A group of 20-somethings was winding up a day of heat and horses in the Independence Day sun. Lynn Lacascia, 27, wearing a black dress and sparkle nail polish, said she had seen the new ads and thought they were goofy but effective and necessary to draw in non-initiates. "It isn't like baseball," she said. "You don't grow up with it and know how it's played."
Her friend Cheryl Manganella said the programs were getting more "user friendly" and pointed out that the 45-minute train ride from Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station to Belmont takes no longer than the subway run to Yankee Stadium.
"It's still not incredibly trendy," she said. "But it's not as stodgy as it used to be." How about that for a slogan?
So you want to be a horse player? Beyond an expert's knowledge of jockey logic and equine psychology, you're going to need a few other things. Namely many, many ill-fitting clothes. The regulars at Belmont are a famously helpful bunch, always quick with a tip on a long shot or a low-interest loan, but only if they feel you're one of them. And since most railbirds can spot a poseur a furlong away, it's best to look and act the part.
If there is a single defining theme to Belmont chic, it's retro with a strong sense of shrinkage. Indeed, while the upper decks may be filled with such conservative attire as dress shirts and matching socks, for the true fans in general admission, fanny packs, mullet hairdos and little brown fedoras never went out of style. Anything designed before the Clinton administration will work, although the closer you can get to the Nixon years, the more you'll fit in.
To this end, my ensemble on Independence Day included a beer company T-shirt, a too-shrunken linen jacket I bought at Country Road in the mid-1990s and a pair of unnaturally shortened gray pants from high school. To accessorize, I chose a half-empty pack of Camel Lights and a box of Tic Tacs I found in my winter coat.
One sure way to learn about the fundamentals of racetrack behavior is to take the Belmont Special, the lazy Long Island Rail Road locomotive that departs Penn Station at exactly 62 minutes before post time. There, amid the splendor of vinyl seats and Viagra ads, you can quickly glean a few basics. The color this season is apparently off-brown, created by a coffee-stain wash. Black dress shoes are also popular, but only if worn with white socks. Tweed is still king.
The train can also be handy for picking up betting advice. For example, I overheard a fellow passenger telling his wife that the surest way to win was to "bet on the horse with the thickest neck." Another fellow told me never to bet on any horse owned by a corporation, a tip I was ready to ignore. I later dropped US$20 on a thin-necked nag with the suspicious name of Interdigital.
Quinellas and trifectas
Once you get to the track, it's handy to know a few betting terms. A quinella is a bet on the first two horses; it is not, as some people believe, a Mexican cheese pie. A trifecta is a bet on the first three horses; it is not a type of model/actress/spokeswoman. And a superfecta is a bet on the first four ponies, or as I sometimes call it, "the bet where I lost US$48."
After the races begin, the only place to be is at the rail, where the horses roar by, the losing tickets paper the cement and plaid and stripes mingle freely. It was here, after the sixth race, in which I lost US$15, that I met my favorite racetrack fashion figure. I didn't get his name, but his style was pure thoroughbred: white shoes, white slacks, pink shirt and white jacket.
He told me, while buying a beer, that the No. 2 horse in the next race was a sure thing. Why? "I own it," he said. Intrigued, I placed a small wager on No. 2 to show, and sure enough, there he was at the wire. As I cashed in my first winner of the day, I realized the ultimate Belmont lesson: Winning never goes out of style.
RETHINK? The defense ministry and Navy Command Headquarters could take over the indigenous submarine project and change its production timeline, a source said Admiral Huang Shu-kuang’s (黃曙光) resignation as head of the Indigenous Submarine Program and as a member of the National Security Council could affect the production of submarines, a source said yesterday. Huang in a statement last night said he had decided to resign due to national security concerns while expressing the hope that it would put a stop to political wrangling that only undermines the advancement of the nation’s defense capabilities. Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) yesterday said that the admiral, her older brother, felt it was time for him to step down and that he had completed what he
Taiwan has experienced its most significant improvement in the QS World University Rankings by Subject, data provided on Sunday by international higher education analyst Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) showed. Compared with last year’s edition of the rankings, which measure academic excellence and influence, Taiwanese universities made great improvements in the H Index metric, which evaluates research productivity and its impact, with a notable 30 percent increase overall, QS said. Taiwanese universities also made notable progress in the Citations per Paper metric, which measures the impact of research, achieving a 13 percent increase. Taiwanese universities gained 10 percent in Academic Reputation, but declined 18 percent
UNDER DISCUSSION: The combatant command would integrate fast attack boat and anti-ship missile groups to defend waters closest to the coastline, a source said The military could establish a new combatant command as early as 2026, which would be tasked with defending Taiwan’s territorial waters 24 nautical miles (44.4km) from the nation’s coastline, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday. The new command, which would fall under the Naval Command Headquarters, would be led by a vice admiral and integrate existing fast attack boat and anti-ship missile groups, along with the Naval Maritime Surveillance and Reconnaissance Command, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous. It could be launched by 2026, but details are being discussed and no final timetable has been announced, the source
SHOT IN THE ARM: The new system can be integrated with Avenger and Stinger missiles to bolster regional air defense capabilities, a defense ministry report said Domestically developed Land Sword II (陸射劍二) missiles were successfully launched and hit target drones during a live-fire exercise at the Jiupeng Military Base in Pingtung County yesterday. The missiles, developed by the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology (CSIST), were originally scheduled to launch on Tuesday last week, after the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday long weekend, but were postponed to yesterday due to weather conditions. Local residents and military enthusiasts gathered outside the base to watch the missile tests, with the first one launching at 9:10am. The Land Sword II system, which is derived from the Sky Sword II (天劍二) series, was turned