Kangaroo leather soccer boots & thoroughbred racing in NYC, both now history, were both booming businesses not so very long ago
QUEENS, New York––The ongoing FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, from which Team USA was eliminated on July 6, 2026 in Seattle, and the June 28, 2026 last race at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York City, may mark turning points in human exploitation of two of the world’s fastest large mammals: kangaroos and thoroughbred horses.
Only time will tell about that. Both events, however, spotlight how rapidly spectator sports culture can change in response to pressure on behalf of animals.
As intransigent as participant sports culture can seem, for instance in the persistence of cockfighting, spectator sports are a whole different matter. When public opinion changes, spectator sports change––or, like greyhound racing over recent decades and as horse racing seems likely to follow, implode and die.
Kangaroo cleats get the boot
“At its start,” blogged Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action president Wayne Pacelle, who had apparently been watching the FIFA tournament and counting shoes, “the 2026 FIFA World Cup featured 48 national teams and 1,248 players on the official tournament rosters.”
Among them, Pacelle observed “perhaps just a single player in the tournament — Junnosuke Suzuki of Japan — who laced up soccer cleats made from kangaroo skins.
“Just six years ago, when the Center for a Humane Economy and Animal Wellness Action launched the Kangaroos Are Not Shoes campaign,” Pacelle remembered, “kangaroo leather had been woven into the identity of elite soccer.
“For more than half a century, the world’s leading athletic brands had promoted kangaroo leather as a premium material for high-performance boots.
“So, when we began our campaign in 2020,” Pacelle wrote, “there were dozens upon dozens of kangaroo-skin shoe models lining store shelves around the world.
“Generations of players had come to believe that if you wanted to play like the pros, you needed boots made from kangaroo leather.”
Collapse of Aqueduct took 20 years
The collapse of thoroughbred racing at Aqueduct by contrast took more than 20 years, but only because the track kept itself alive by becoming more a heavily subsidized gambling casino than the locale of actual athletic events, be the athletes humans or animals.
The horses still ran, until June 28, 2026, but ever fewer people looked up from gaming to watch them.
Recounts Wikipedia, “Aqueduct Racetrack, in the South Ozone Park and Jamaica neighborhoods of Queens, was the last racetrack to operate within New York City limits.
“Operating near the site of a former conduit of the Brooklyn Waterworks that brought water from eastern Long Island to the Ridgewood Reservoir, Aqueduct Racetrack was opened on September 27, 1894, by the Queens County Jockey Club.”
Repeatedly expanded and renovated, Aqueduct by 1981 even featured the biggest restaurant in New York City.
Horse manure piled up
But the horse manure surrounding thoroughbred racing piled up, the stench kept generations of otherwise sports and gambling-crazed New Yorkers away, and by 2022 the New York Racing Association was planning to close Aqueduct, hoping to sell the part of the 170-acre property it owns to offset losses and finance improvements to the Belmont Park track in Belmont, Long Island.
The 110 acres of the Aqueduct Racetrack that New York state owns are to be redeveloped with $455 million in capital funds allocated by the state in 2023.
The New York Racing Association hopes to keep Belmont Park alive by redirecting the former Aqueduct crowds to Belmont, just 10 miles east, but a similar pattern of consolidation marked the death spiral for greyhound racing, and most of the Aqueduct crowds of the track’s glory years have gone to where none return.
Horseracing Wrongs
The anti-horse racing organization Horseracing Wrongs posted to Facebook in commemoration of the Aqueduct closure that it had since 2014 confirmed the deaths of 173 horses there, while “Countless more horses have suffered and died over the track’s history.
“The industry’s ‘fondest memories’ of Aqueduct,” charged Horseracing Wrongs, “include horses racing in blinding snow, pounding through sloppy tracks, individual horses forced to race more than 100 times, and bleeding from the lungs,” suffered “for gambling and entertainment.”
“Attendance at Aqueduct fell from more than 42,000 people on opening day in 1959 to crowds so small that the New York Racing Association stopped counting a long time ago,” Horseracing Wrongs alleged.
Bankruptcy
The beginning of the end for Aqueduct became evident on November 2, 2006, when the New York Racing Association filed for bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy filing at the time, however, was widely viewed as a pressure tactic to oblige the New York State Racing & Wagering Board to allow Aqueduct to install video lottery terminals.
“The New York Racing Association has also warned the state that if it is forced out of business, it would go to court over ownership of the Aqueduct, Belmont and Saratoga race tracks,” reported Michel Gormley for Associated Press. The New York Racing Association contends it owns the tracks,” while the state held that the tracks were state property.
(Facebook photo)
Starving horses
The New York Racing Association more-or-less won that confrontation, but was tripped by scandal in April 2009 after 177 starving horses were discovered at Center Brook Farm in Climax, New York, home of the racing stable of Aqueduct trainer Ernie Paragallo.
Convicted on 33 counts of cruelty to animals, Paragallo was sent to prison for two years and was barred from racing in New York state.
Paragallo allegedly attempted to sell his horses to slaughter. The New York Racing Association responded on December 11, 2009 announcing that it would bar from competition any horse owner or trainer caught selling horses for slaughter.
Doping
Scandal struck again on November 3, 2010, when three unlabeled syringes were found in the Aqueduct barn leased by Richard Dutrow Jr., who had trained 2008 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Big Brown.
“Dutrow was responsible for the illegal syringes even though he was in Kentucky for the Breeders’ Cup,” explained Albany Times Union staff writer Tim Wilkin.
“Then, on November 20, 2010, a horse named Fastus Cactus tested positive for the banned drug butorphanol after a race at Aqueduct.”
The New York State Racing & Wagering Board in 2011 suspended Dutrow for ten years.
Breakdowns
That fracas was barely finished when the 2012 Aqueduct winter racing season featured 21 fatal horse breakdowns, twice the reported fatality rate from previous meets.
Suggested New York Times horse racing writers Walt Bogdanich, Joe Drape, Dara L. Milers, and Griffin Palmer, “If anything, the new economics of racing are making an always-dangerous game even more so. Faced with a steep loss of customers, racetracks have increasingly added casino gambling to their operations, resulting in higher purses but also providing an incentive for trainers to race unfit horses.
“At Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens,” the New York Times team noted in particular, “the number of dead and injured horses has risen sharply since a casino opened there late last year.”
The New York State Racing & Wagering Board responded in April 2012 by posting an online database of horse deaths, accidents, and related information dating back to 2009, along with data going back nearly 30 years about fines, suspensions and other disciplinary actions taken against owners, trainers and jockeys.
Inquiry
A gubernatorial inquiry into the horse fatalities at Aqueduct concluded in September 2012, Drape and Bogdanich summarized, that “More than half of the 21 racehorses who had fatal breakdowns at Aqueduct Racetrack earlier this year might have been saved had racing authorities more closely monitored their health and the liberal use of prescription drugs to keep them racing.
“Both racing officials and regulatory veterinarians, who were supposed to protect the horses, often ignored signs that they were ailing and allowed them to race for purses inflated with money from the track’s adjacent gambling casino, according to people with direct knowledge of the investigation s report,” Drape and Bogdanich wrote.
“The investigation found that veterinarians and officials of the New York Racing Association often cared more about filling races that generate revenue for trainers, owners and the racetracks than about whether horses were fit to compete.”
Quarantine
Then-New York governor Andrew M. Cuomo had already announced plans to take over the New York Racing Association, described by Drape and Bogdanich as a “quasi-public agency that oversees the operations of tracks at Aqueduct, Belmont, and Saratoga.”
Cuomo alleged that the New York Racing Association had been dysfunctional since its inception in 1955 and had been responsible, Drape and Bogdanich paraphrased, “for decades of scandal, bankruptcy proceedings and a previous state financial bailout.”
Still, Drape and Bogdanich conceded, “The imperiled racing industry generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the state.”
Under the newly reconstituted New York Racing Association, the Aqueduct Racetrack avoided trouble until April 2014, when an outbreak of equine herpesvirus put a barn under a week-long precautionary quarantine, just as “several horses based in Europe are scheduled to ship in for the $1.25 million Belmont Derby Invitational and the $1 million Belmont Oaks Invitational races for 3-year-old males and females,” the Daily Racing News reported.
The European horses were to have been boarded at Aqueduct.
Grape Soda
Perhaps the last major controversy involving Aqueduct before the countdown to closure came in January 2021.
Reported Liz Roscher for Yahoo Sports, “Horse trainer Eric Guillot has been banned by the New York Racing Association and 1/ST Racing for changing the name of one of his horses to a racial slur,” directed at an African-American television sports analyst.
(Beth Clifton photo/collage)
“Guillot, who has made $13 million over his career from horses he trained, tweeted on January 1, 2021 that the three-year-old colt he was running at Aqueduct Racetrack was being given a new name,” Roscher explained.
The new name, Grape Soda, would probably not have been perceived as offensive except that Guillot made a point of explaining that it was supposed to be offensive.
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