SARATOGA SPRINGS — Horse racing experts said Tuesday it is unlikely race tracks will ever again see the crowds that turned up in decades past.

Panels made up of horse racing industry professionals from across the nation met for a one-day conference sponsored by the Government Law Center of Albany Law School at the Gideon Putnam Hotel to discuss several racing related topics.

National Thoroughbred Racing Association President Alex Waldrop said NASCAR, professional wrestling and the National Football League have huge fan bases because the general population has easy access to the competitions on television.

Teams and franchises are able to draw large amounts of money because they pool broadcast rights and share in the revenues that are generated from events occurring several times a week.

“Our viewership numbers are not sufficient to drive revenues,” Waldrop said. “NASCAR may have one big race a week. We have 70,000 races [a year] around the country.”

He said most people who go to the track were first brought there by someone who enjoyed the sport and wanted to share the experience.

Steven Crist, publisher of the Daily Racing Form, said he lives about four miles from the Belmont Park race track in Elmont but he rarely attends races in person more than once a week.

“I sit at home in my den with a better TV than I can watch at the track and I have my computer and my dogs and I’m comfortable watching the races,” Crist said. “People at hundreds of tracks around the country have tried getting people back for 25 years. It’s not going to happen. The world has changed.”

Tuesday’s comments came as the New York Racing Association announced that attendance at Saratoga Race Course was down for the first two weeks of the season.

Paid admission is down nearly 17 percent and the on-track handle is off by almost 9 percent after the second week of the season.

NYRA’s figures show track paid admission for the first 12 days was 267,895, compared to 321,249 for the same period during the 2007 meet.

Another panel discussion Tuesday centered on NYRA’s successful bid for a new contract to run the three tracks in New York.

NYRA Chairman C. Steven Duncker said great progress has been made in recent weeks between his organization and state legislators and agencies overseeing the racing industry in New York.

In February, the Legislature approved a new 25-year franchise agreement with NYRA, which is contingent on the racing association emerging from bankruptcy.

NYRA hoped to emerge by the end of June, but that has been delayed by a number of issues, including completing the contracts with the state and turning ownership of the three track properties over to the state, then leasing back the tracks.

Duncker said he could not predict exactly when the work will be done, but an end is in sight.

“There are still issues that may take a number of weeks, but if I were graphing the progress, I would show the graph sloping upward,” he said.

Attorney Paul Francis, who is on the board of New York City’s Off Track Betting Board of Directors and was part of the Eliot Spitzer administration, said NYRA’s competitors for the contract to run the tracks were each mostly interested in video lottery terminals that are expected to be placed at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens. NYRA President Charles Hayward said in June that he believed that by late 2009 the lucrative computerized gaming machines should be ready to go online at Aqueduct.

“It was a difficult process that took a long time and required three-way consensus on every issue that was negotiated,” Francis said, referring to the franchise agreement that was reached in February between the governor, Assembly and state Senate.

He said because it took many months to reach a consensus, three other organizations that had expressed interest initially dropped out of the running for one reason or another.

“The alternatives were not really attractive anyway,” he said.