 From left, Joan Allen, Dustin Hoffman, John Ortiz and Dennis Farina in a scene from HBO’s “Luck.” (Associated Press/HBO, Gusmano Cesaretti) Every week I answer a question from the previous Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the April 3 chat here and submit questions for the April 10 chat here. This week readers seemed interested in declining sports and other forms of entertainment, and so I’ll try to answer one of those queries here. Apparently following horse-racing is decreasing in popularity in recent decades. Any ideas why younger folks don’t get interested in it the way older generations did? Full disclosure: I’m not a fan, but have an elderly friend who is. Observers have been debating reasons for the decline of the so-called sport of kings for at least a decade, if not longer. In 2010, the New York Times rounded up 15 reasons horse-racing was declining nationally and threw in additional six reasons the sport was facing specific challenges in New York State. A few years after that, the New Republic published a fascinating look at the industry by Elizabeth Minkel, based on her experiences working as a clerk taking track bets. “Taking bets gives you a view of racing that has very little to do with horses and a lot to do with the people who like to bet on them,” she wrote. “Going to the track was once habitual, a quiet afternoon with the Racing Form and a few buddies; now it's mostly an event destination, a couple of big days a year to go wild, and the tracks are responding in kind. There's a growing trend of what's known as ‘big event’ racing, where major stakes races are packed into a single card rather than spread across a few days, as they've been in the past.” I also think it’s instructive to look at “Luck,” David Milch’s horse-racing series for HBO. The series had plenty of problems purely as a dramatic show, among them a heavy reliance on track jargon. But I suspect that if a number of horses hadn’t died during production of the show, HBO would have given “Luck” a crack at a second season, as it has given so many other shows space to find themselves. It’s one thing to ask new audiences to learn all the technical information involved in understanding not just that one horse runs faster than another but also why it’s capable of doing so. It might be less appealing to learn about the technical aspects of the sport, if that sport involves animals being so grievously injured that they have to be destroyed. It’s no wonder that the hoopla and parties around an event like a Kentucky Derby have eclipsed the actual race for a lot of viewers: A picture hat is more appealing than an animal in agony. | 
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