“Edibles & Potables” is Food & Dining Magazine’s Sunday slot for news and views that range beyond our customary metropolitan Louisville coverage area, as intended to be food (and drink) for thought.
However, the time draws near, and today’s column is Louisville-centric.
The plain, indisputable and locally unpalatable fact about Churchill Downs moving this year’s Kentucky Oaks race to a prime time television slot (from around 6:00 p.m. last year to 8:40 p.m. in Friday, May 1) is that while Churchill Downs Incorporated (CDI) may be headquartered in Louisville, it is a publicly traded racing and gaming company (Nasdaq: CHDN) that has many institutional investors among its shareholders (BlackRock, Inc., Vanguard Group Inc., et al).
In short, it isn’t so much that CDI doesn’t care about our dinner plans. It’s that CDI (with more than a billion dollars in revenue in 2020) cares more about its value as a publicly traded company than our dinner plans, and there exists no compelling reason whatever why CDI would hesitate to retool local traditions unless there is a demonstrable link between these traditions and the company’s share price.
It’s simple. CDI’s job is to enhance the value of itself as a company, full stop. The same goes for the Yankees, Lakers and Bears.
If the TV deal for Oaks is a success, and CDI profits mightily from it, the deal will remain in place and become the new norm. Tradition will be accommodated to the needs of business. This is the way capitalism is supposed to work, and that’s why this controversy has little to do with Churchill Downs.
Rather, it’s about the economic system we inhabit and abet, one which ordains both winners and losers, this being a fact of life as American as apple pie, even when the pie is baked overseas or rendered with a laser printer. The “rules” as currently constituted support CDI’s manipulation of race times to compel higher profits; case closed, and we’d be laughed out of court contesting it.
Strictly speaking, it is none of CDI’s business whether anyone but Churchill Downs itself makes money during Derby season, and I’m completely confident that CDI agrees wholeheartedly with my assessment, ‘cuz it isn’t as if I’m quoting Karl Marx.
Either we make new rules via legal and legislative mechanisms at our disposal, or we head for the Taco Bell drive-thru at midnight on the 1st, risk soiling our showy suits and hats, cease our...Read more
