From the Good News Department: The Washington Racing Commission met Monday to discuss Emerald’s request to drop the four Friday race cards in August. Why the request? Here is Emerald President Phil Ziegler in the TDN:
“I was told at the beginning of the season that filling three days a week of racing was going to be difficult to maybe impossible. And I said, ‘Well, we have to try, give it our best shot to do this.’ And we tried. Everybody knows that we’ve struggled to fill races and cards this season. There’s been a couple of occasions where, I believe, if this was almost any other track, we would have already lost three or four days.
“Handle’s down 15% from last year. … We have 692 horses versus 915 [and] starters are down 21%. … Our average field size is 6.19 compared to 7.32. That is a shocking thing. But this is the most shocking number: Last year, this time, we had 15 races that went with [as few as] five horses. This year, 56. And a lot of those aren’t four-horse fields. They’re fours and a couple of threes.”
With Portland Meadows’ shuttering in 2019, Golden Gate’s in 2024 (with the NorCal fair circuit following), and Hastings’ this past December, Emerald is it on the Pacific Coast until you get to Southern California. Hence, the “horse population” problem. Ultimately, the Commission approved the cutback. Here’s hoping ’tis the beginning of the end.
Meantime, in Illinois: The initial purchase bid for bankrupt Hawthorne has come in at $90M – but, and here’s the good news, that bidder intends to redevelop the property for other-than-racing purposes. A bankruptcy judge has extended the deadline for competing bids to Jul 10, with the hope within the industry that a “going concern” bid – i.e., one that intends to keep racing – will come in. If not, this would mean the end of Thoroughbred racing at Hawthorne (the harness operation there has already closed), leaving Fairmount as Illinois’ lone racetrack. The progress is set to continue…
