Is NYRA the next NY City OTB?

The Belmont Stakes is fast approaching and 100,000-plus will trek to Long Island to witness I'll Have Another's attempt at racing immortality. With money pouring in from the slots at Aqueduct, purses at the New York tracks are extraordinary. Saratoga is right around the corner.

These should be the best of times for the New York Racing Association, but they are anything but. A recent scandal over overcharging bettors cost two top NYRA executives their jobs and led New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to wage a bloodless coup. Sometime after the Belmont, a new NYRA will begin to take shape, one that will take its orders from a CEO/President and a Board of Directors largely handpicked by Cuomo himself.

That a government, any government, is going to have such a huge say in the future of New York racing has a lot of people nervous, and it should. This is, after all, the state that was home to the biggest debacle in horse racing history: the government run New York City OTB Corporation.

The sole reason OTB was such a colossal failure was because of the people who were chosen to run it. Its executives were not picked for their business acumen, their knowledge of racing or because of past success in some other endeavor. They were picked because of whom they knew.