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‘Right Horses In The Right Spot’: James Graham Hoping Luck Holds Again This Summer At Ellis Park

James Graham won last year's Ellis Park riding title amid what likely was the toughest jockey colony in track history. Now he'll try to repeat his crown against an even deeper assembly of riders during the RUNHAPPY Summer Meet at Ellis Park that begins Thursday and runs through Aug. 30.

Graham won the 2019 Ellis title with 26 wins to nip the 25 accrued by three-time defending champion Corey Lanerie and Tyler Baze, who had just relocated from California to Kentucky. Graham has been adept this past year in winning meet championships in photo finishes, taking the Fair Grounds winter title in New Orleans with 63 victories, one better than Mitchell Murrill and three more than Colby Hernandez, both of whom will be based at Ellis Park for the first time.

Lanerie, who has won five Ellis titles overall, was out of state riding on the last day of the 2019 meet, when Graham won two races to secure his first crown at a Kentucky track.

“We got lucky,” Graham said. “Corey was out of town the last weekend, just about. If Corey had been there, would he have won two or one? Would Tyler have gotten lucky? With a couple of better trips from the horses he rode, he might have won it, too. Just luck. Riding the right horses in the right spot in the right time.”

But don't think that the 41-year-old doesn't take deep pride in winning his first riding title in Kentucky, after having won riding titles at Chicago's Arlington Park and New Orleans' Fair Grounds.

“Always, always,” Graham said. “Every win is an achievement.”

Still, he insists he didn't think about winning the title until the final days.

“I don't think about stuff like that,” Graham said. “I just think about the here and the now and riding races. I didn't realize I was as close as I was. I was just doing my work, enjoying it, because I enjoy riding. And that's what it's about. It's not about, 'Yeah, we knew we were close, but we didn't know if we were actually going get there.' Because you're worried about now and not what's going to happen in three or four days from now.”

With 15 wins, Graham also had a big meet at Churchill Downs, whose meet ended this past Sunday.

“You can never expect too much in horse racing,” he said. “You hope to have a good meet. The bonus is coming out of it without being hurt, making it through and making a living for yourself.”

Graham, a married father of three, grew up in Dublin, Ireland, coming to the United States in 2002 and working as an exercise rider in Lexington. His first summer as a jockey in America came in 2003 at Ellis Park before he moved on to ride at Chicago's Arlington Park in the summers and then on to California before returning to Kentucky fours years ago.

As the purse money got better at Ellis Park, so did the competition to win races.

Last year Florent Geroux and Baze were among those deciding that it works well to stay in Kentucky for the summer, riding at Ellis Park except when stakes business drew them out of state. Geroux is a five-time Breeders' Cup winner, including on Horse of the Year Gun Runner and Kentucky Oaks winner and champion Monomoy Girl. Baze was the Eclipse Award-winning apprentice jockey in 2000.

New for 2020 are two-time Eclipse Award-winning jockey Julien Leparoux, California mainstays Joe Talamo and Martin Garcia, Louisiana stalwart Colby Hernandez (brother of Kentucky-based Brian Hernandez) and the up-and-coming Mitchell Murrill, along with the return of two-time Ellis champ Rafael Bejarano after 13 years in California. That's in addition to the strong cast of regulars: Graham, Lanerie, Brian Hernandez, Miguel Mena, Shaun Bridgmohan and — oh, by the way — three-time Kentucky Derby-winner and Hall of Famer Calvin Borel.

“No matter where you go in Kentucky, it's always tough,” Graham said. “You've got a lot of good riders. Miguel Mena has a fantastic meet wherever he goes because he's a very good rider. You've got Mitchell Murrill coming in; he's been second at the Fair Grounds a couple of times. It's not like it's going to be easy anywhere being leading rider. And you've got Corey and you've got Brian. You got Colby Hernandez. A lot of guys are staying in Kentucky this year.

“… The riders here win races everywhere. To me, you hope everything goes well, hopefully get on some pretty nice stock. You look at the stock that ran last year, there were a lot of good horses who went to the Breeders' Cup, a lot of good 2-year-olds that broke their maidens at Ellis. The quality of horses in Kentucky has always been good. The quality of the maidens at Ellis Park have always been decent, but they've gotten better over the past couple of years. People don't want to go to New York and run against the heavy-heads like Todd Pletcher, Chad Brown and a couple of those guys who are always loaded. But we've got good horses. It's been very competitive the last couple of years in Kentucky with young horses and everybody kind of wanting to stay at home.”

With the exception of Churchill Downs meet-leader Tyler Gaffalione and Ricardo Santana Jr., who both will go to Saratoga for the summer, Ellis Park's jockeys' room will be much the same as the Louisville track. And Santana is riding the first two days at Ellis.

“I don't think there's ever been an Ellis Park jockey colony this deep, and I've been going to every meet since I was a kid,” said Jimmy McNerney, Ellis Park's announcer and race analyst. “Since we raised our purses and the quality of racing, every year the colony has gotten better. This is obviously the strongest one to date. You can go 12 deep in here. There's never been that many Derby and Breeders' Cup-winning jockeys at Ellis.”

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After Weeks Of Negotiation, Arlington Park, Horsemen Come To Agreement For 2020 Meet

Live racing at Arlington Park in Arlington Heights, Il. will begin on July 23, as approved by the Illinois Racing Board during a special teleconference meeting on Monday.

That approval was held up by contract negotiations between Arlington representatives and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, with the two sides close to an agreement several times over the past two weeks. The main sticking point had been the length of the contract; Arlington wanted a two-year deal, while the ITHA wanted to keep it to a single year.

After multiple rescheduled meetings of the IRB, the parties finally came to an agreement and signed a contract shortly before Monday's teleconference call. Live racing will begin at Arlington on July 23 without spectators, and racing a total of 30 race days on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays with daily post times of 2 p.m. or 2:30 p.m.

The Arlington Million will not be held in 2020.

On Monday's call, a recess of the meeting had to be called after Hawthorne Race Course's assistant general manager John Walsh suggested his track be awarded some dark host days, and the ensuing conversation became heated.

“Dark host days” award an increased portion of revenues collected from off-track betting on days without live racing. Walsh made the argument that Hawthorne had incurred costs of approximately $239,000 per month for the three months its backside was open while Arlington Park's remained closed, allowing horsemen to have a place to stable their horses during the pandemic.

Arlington representatives balked at the idea, arguing that reassigning dark host days would put the Arlington meet in jeopardy due to having to reassess purse money.

Following the 30-minute recess, a motion for Hawthorne to receive some of Arlington's dark host days was defeated 5-1. The motion to approve the existing Arlington Park/ITHA agreement then passed unanimously.

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Yet Another Blown Arlington Deadline as Chaos Consumes Last-Ditch Negotiations

For the second consecutive day–and for the fourth time in two weeks–the Illinois Racing Board (IRB) on Friday had to put off voting on the fate of the nearly two-month overdue 2020 season at Arlington International Race Course.

That’s because the track and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (ITHA) still can’t come to terms on a signed contract for the meet, which is a requirement before the commission can award race dates.

What has been a tense negotiating process for the better part of nine months (with four blown IRB-mandated deadlines this June alone) devolved into a new realm of chaos during the June 19 teleconference: Arlington sent its version of a final, signed contract to the ITHA during–not before–Friday’s IRB meeting to approve the deal.

Then when the ITHA’s legal team scrambled to get a first read of that document during a hastily called recess, they realized that sometime during frenzied back-and-forth rounds of editing over the last 24 hours, different versions of the deal had gotten mixed up, making it difficult to know whether issues important to both sides got incorporated into the near-final version.

“So now we’re totally at odds, like, ‘Holy cow, what’s going on here?'” Kerry Lavelle, an attorney for the ITHA, told the IRB after discovering the botched documents. “You can see while scratching your head [how] the veracity of the whole process starts to break down, because we don’t know what’s going on.”

IRB chairman Daniel Beiser didn’t want to hear the details about the mix-up. He again recessed the meeting–which technically began on Thursday and had already been carried over to Friday–until Monday at 9 a.m. Central, at which time he vowed that the board would “one way or another come to conclusion on this item.”

But will the new Monday deadline be for real? Beiser had used nearly verbatim language on Thursday when the gave the ultimatum that Friday would be the absolute latest that the IRB would “finally dispose of this matter one way or the other.”

Arlington and the horsemen’s group two sides have been sparring since last October over crafting this deal. By contrast, the ITHA claimed back in January that its 2020 race-meet contract negotiations with nearby Hawthorne Racecourse took only one hour to complete.

Talks lagged through early spring, then the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world. Arlington’s previously scheduled May 1 opening date came and went without any horses being allowed to stable at suburban Chicago’s premier track.

As Illinois emerged from the health lockdown, both parties realized time was running out on the prospects for a 2020 racing season. An IRB meeting to award dates on June 5 resulted in mandated weekend-long negotiations mediated by the IRB. But when that meeting resumed June 8, the two sides could still not come to terms on a contract.

On June 17 there appeared to be a breakthrough just in time for the IRB’s meeting the next day, at which the Arlington dates were again on the agenda: The track issued a notice on Twitter Wednesday afternoon announcing that the two sides had reached a “tentative” deal for both 2020 and 2021 racing. According to the post, the 30-date 2020 meet would run July 23-Sep. 30. Additional reports said the two parties had agreed there would be no stakes program in 2020, including the track’s signature race, the GI Arlington Million.

But the deal did not materialize in time for Thursday’s IRB meeting, so a recess was granted until Friday in yet another last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock. There appeared to be two remaining issues—purse projections and a contingency for what would happen if Arlington didn’t (or couldn’t) race in 2021.

When the IRB reconvened at 1 p.m. Friday, IRB commissioner Thomas McCauley, who has been the board’s lead mediator, explained that he believed both sides had agreed to resolve purse projections similar to the way salary arbitration hearings are conducted in pro baseball. Bu the two sides still had to agree on what would happen in the event that out-of-control circumstances (like a pandemic) kept Arlington from racing in 2021.

Arlington president Tony Petrillo then told commissioners that “We had sent a final, signed agreement over to the ITHA that addressed the reconciliation payment, which we feel is a final offer and should close this issue, and that’s our current status.”

David McCaffrey, the ITHA’s executive director, then was granted the floor. Appearing taken aback, he said he had no idea what Petrillo was talking about, because the ITHA had not received any such signed contract from Arlington before the meeting.

Yet as McCaffrey was speaking, the contract popped up in his email. He said it was time-stamped eight minutes after the meeting had begun.

“Does anyone see the unfairness in sending us a contract at 1:08 p.m. on a call that started at 1 p.m. and have me say yes or no?” an exasperated McCaffrey asked.

His words were met with silence by everyone else on the conference call.

“I don’t know what to say, other than at one o’clock when I called into this meeting, despite all the feverish attempts that have been made over the last two or three weeks, we had a deal that we would agree to sign that was submitted this morning to the racing board. We will stand behind that. But I can’t respond to something that was sent to me 10 minutes ago,” McCaffrey said.

Beiser called for a recess to allow the ITHA time to examine Arlington’s latest offer. The break lasted 2 1/2 hours.

Upon resumption is when Lavelle notified the commissioners of the discrepancies between the contract drafts, explaining that the red-lining process had gone awry. He said his legal team did a comparison of what they believed to be the correct versions from each party to reach the “true version.”

But when the ITHA team did that, Lavelle said, it revealed that Arlington had included new blocks of language about force majeure that he had never seen before.

He emailed Petrillo before the meeting came back in session, who essentially told him “take it or leave it,” according to Lavelle.

“Our team needs some time to go through line by line to know what we’re going to do, and we do intend to come through, probably like Monday, [with] improvements,” Lavelle said.

Beiser granted the two sides time for another weekend-long work session, and then gave Petrillo the opportunity to respond before recessing the meeting.

“In order to help the ITHA move forward in a more expeditious manner, the agreement that I signed is the agreement that they should be working off of,” Petrillo said. “We notified them of that at the time that that was sent. [Just for clarification, there are] no other documents.”

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Down To The Wire: Arlington, Horsemen Still Working On Deal For 2020-21

After both sides announced they had reached a tentative deal for a 2020 race meet late Wednesday, representatives from Arlington Park and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association agreed Thursday they needed just a little more time to hammer out some more minor points.

At a teleconference meeting of the Illinois Racing Board Thursday, the two groups revealed they have agreed to a total of 30 race dates beginning July 23 and racing Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays with daily post times of 2 p.m. or 2:30 p.m. Sept. 27 through 30 would be considered dark days for Arlington.

According to testimony before the board Thursday, the sticking point is now 2021. Arlington wants a two-year agreement with the horsemen's group, which was initially opposed to making a deal beyond 2020. Now, the two sides have agreed to make a two-year deal but disagree on what to do if their projections for revenue or planned number of race dates assigned turn out to be incorrect. It seemed Thursday as though Arlington was willing to leave the contingencies fairly open with an intent to renegotiate for 2021 if necessary, while the horsemen want everything spelled out before signing a deal.

The board took a 15-minute recess in hopes these last points could be cleared up in that time, but upon return decided to recess the meeting until Friday at 1 p.m. local time. Board executive director Domenic DiCera and commissioner Thomas McCauley are scheduled to conduct a phone meeting with the two sides beforehand to help iron out any further disagreements, with the hope that the 1 p.m. board meeting will result in an allocation of dates and signed agreement for the 2020 meet at Arlington.

All seemed to concur that if a contract could not be agreed upon by Friday, it seemed unlikely the two parties would be able to reach an agreement for 2020 at all.

Two callers in Thursday's meeting expressed concern and confusion that Arlington OTB facilities did not seem to be operating as expected — being closed when they were supposed to be open, lacking the ability to make cash payouts or sell programs. Hawthorne's OTBs have, by contrast, been busy and pulling in considerably more money for horsemen, according to Tony Somone from the Illinois Harness Horsemen's Association. Somone also pointed out that Arlington OTBs were showing only TVG races during a recent visit and did not include a feed from Hawthorne, which is not carried by TVG.

Arlington Park president Tony Petrillo said the OTB's open hours had been submitted to the board and customers should have been able to make in-and-out wagers during that time.

Friday's meeting of the Illinois Racing Board will be livestreamed on the board's website.

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