4/14/2004

Magna Stymied

when he boldly embarked upon his mission to take over thoroughbred horseracing in North America, Frank Stronach boasted that those in charge were out of touch with reality and that he had the ultimate solution.

Such delusional bravado was also heard back in the 1930s, when another Austrian had grand designs of his own. But both endeavours were fatally flawed from the get-go. And, just as the Magna Fuhrer has found out that the politics of his chosen sport would scupper his aspirations to take over New York OTB, so he is now discovering that Maryland, too, wants no part of his largesse or radical visions.

Maryland racing has always been a vital cog in the North American racing calendar. And the reason that MEC bought out the DeFrancis family was to control the second jewel in the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes, which they thought would give then leverage with the Kentucky hard-boots who run the sport.

However the NTRA and Breeders' Cup guys have never warmed to Magna or it's sociopathic leader. And, beyond one day of classic racing, the Maryland model and infrastructure (one of his key acquisitions) has turned out to be completely shot.

So it has all come down to acquiring the exclusive rights to revenue from slot machines, which Stronach once described as an unfair tax upon the weak and vulnerable: so that promised improvements could be funded and purses increased to match those in adjacent states.

Now, though, that that decision has been indefintely postponed by the Maryland government, and all indications are that more important matters like health and education preoccupy the minds of local politicians, there is going to be no bale-out. So one has to wonder, what is next on the Magna agenda? Because, apart from looking to slots as a savior, it has shown an alarming ignorance of how to promote it's core product (horseracing), since embarking upon it's great anexation.

Local pundit, Andy Beyer, suggests playing hard-ball, by staging the Preakness at another of the Magna tracks: probably Santa Anita. But not even Frank Stronach would dare attempt such a bold move, that would tear the heart out of the one and only element of thoroughbred racing, the Triple Crown, that means anything to Joe Public in North America these days.

So what lies ahead?

Well, on past form and listening to recent Stronach pronouncements that 'his daughter Belinda was not a career politician'(meaning she's about to abandon that cause just after ill-advisedly entering it on her father's advice) after she'd been championed and paid for by her father to take over the leadership of the Canadian Conservative party, one has to speculate that the Magna Fuhrer (who is in his seventies) may just get tired of banging his head against the unyielding wall of thoroughbred racing's intransigent club, cash in his substantial pile of chips and shuffle off to listen to some good old oom-pa-pa music.

Quite how this would effect horseracing in North America would be interesting. But one could be assured of a blitzkreig of unfunctional assets....meaning the eliminiation of many tracks, for development purposes. And there would not be much that anyone could do about it, because the sport is broke and most people could not care less.

So the end result could be just a handfull of top racetracks in North America being part of a super global circuit, broadcast 24 hours a day to millions of computer terminals and betting shops around the world, with all revenue centralized and put back into the sport.

There would be no leaky-roof, bush tracks. No cheap, unsound horses. Just survival of the fitest and fastest. The supreme product.

This is what Frank Stronach dreamed of. But he now knows that he could never be the one to achieve it, or (god forbid) control it. Sounds like deja vue, doesn't it?