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Racing Archive

Bleak State

How’s this for a depressing flashback? While looking for something else in the Railbird archive, I came across this April 2005 post about Suffolk Downs, “It’s Dying,” written during an especially pessimistic spring:

… expanded gaming won’t solve New England’s long-term racing woes … Thoroughbred racing will leave New England. It’s inevitable.

Yikes. There’s no satisfaction in being proven right.

Although, I haven’t been, not quite yet. Live racing ends at Suffolk Downs on October 4, and simulcasting at the track will cease sometime in December, but the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is “trying to keep the door open” to Thoroughbred racing, approving a more flexible application process for 2015 on Thursday. Commission chair Stephen Crosby sees possibility:

“There’s the Brockton Fair, there’s the Northampton Fair, there’s fairgrounds all over the place, where there are tracks that can accommodate a thoroughbred race. So that’s one of the issues. And plus, you can create a new thoroughbred track. So there are plenty of options out there. How good, which is the better, I don’t have any idea but there are options out there.”

Sure, options. And any proposals submitted for a meet next year are sure to be creative and take into consideration the realities of the current game. After all, as racing director Jennifer Durenberger told the Commission yesterday, horse racing is “a nimble, flexible, and adaptive industry.” (Stop laughing.) One possible option for next year is a meet run by the New England HBPA, which used a letter to the Commission retroactively approving a 65 day meet this year to press its ultimate claim for a “reasonable” 125 days (PDF, page 103).

Posted in Racing on September 26, 2014 / Tagged Suffolk Downs

Sincere Interest

Caught between state law and desperate horsemen, the Massachusetts Gaming Commission agreed on Thursday to “finesse around the regulatory process,” as commissioner Bruce Stebbins put it, and accept “placeholder” applications for a possible 2015 Thoroughbred race meet, so long as “a sincere description of interest” was submitted by the state-mandated deadline of October 1.

“Give us a concept plan, get it into us by the 1st,” said commissioner James McHugh, “and we’ll figure out what to do with it.”

The New England HBPA, which has proposed leasing Suffolk Downs for next year, is expected to submit an application after its officers’ election concludes this week. Suffolk Downs COO Chip Tuttle expressed some skepticism of the group’s plan in a conversation with WBUR’s Jack Lepiarz:

The current operating structure is that they’re losing $10 million a year … you need to erase a $10 million dollar hole and somehow create a $2 million profit. He said to me: “I see no credible way that that can happen right now.”

In 2002, all-sources handle at Suffolk Downs reached $303 million. In 2000, on-track live racing handle totaled $27.6 million. It’s been decline since.

Posted in Racing on September 25, 2014 / Tagged Suffolk Downs

A Runyonesque Farewell

Bill Littlefield:

Some citizens with so many potatoes it does not occur to them at any time to multiply them at Sufferin’ Downs say the race track is no place for a casino, and they are correct on this proposition, and also a blind pig sometimes finds an acorn. I always say ringing bells and other noise such as weeping men losing their homes and families is irritating no little and quite some to citizens whose noses are in the racing form. They are about the difficult business of finding a horse that will not fall down or stop to eat or otherwise occupy itself with business other than running six furlongs or maybe more, and they do not need to be told that Wayne Newton’s show begins …

Posted in Racing on September 24, 2014 / Tagged Suffolk Downs