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00:00Let's get a final story from you here, Jim, before we let you go for the weekend.
00:07Let's hit on Saratoga.
00:08You've got some numbers in from horse racing.
00:10So here we go, Jim.
00:11How are things going in upstate New York?
00:13Yeah, I couldn't let you get away with a couple of weeks in a row without talking about
00:18horse racing.
00:19So we're about halfway through the summer racing season up here at Saratoga, and it's
00:26been raining seemingly for the last week, you know, as it has been up and down the
00:32entire East Coast, really.
00:34And that's really affected the racing up here in terms of being able to run on the turf,
00:39which usually has larger fields, more handle.
00:43So halfway through the meet, handle last year compared to this year is relatively flat,
00:50slight increase, really only a couple of thousand dollars, really.
00:56And a lot of that has to do with the rain.
01:00It's taken a bunch of races off the turf.
01:02You know, last weekend was a big weekend, Whitney Day at Saratoga, and they had two
01:08or three marquee turf races.
01:11Two of them got canceled, one got moved to the dirt.
01:14And when that happens, a lot of the horses scratch out because they don't want to run
01:17on the dirt.
01:18So that's affected handle attendance, kind of walking around there on the weekends like
01:24I do.
01:25It just seems a lot quieter than in years past.
01:27And speaking with some folks at Naira, it seems like the Belmont Stakes weekend up here
01:33in early June, you know, really kind of took a lot of the excitement out of the summer.
01:39Perhaps some people coming into town for their their annual trip to Saratoga, they did that
01:44back in June for the Belmont rather than this summer.