Join Announcer Pete in the Booth to Help TAA

Beginning Dec. 26–Opening Day of Gulfstream Park's Championship Meet–fans will be able to meet and watch track announcer Pete Aiello call a race while helping to retrain, rehome and retire Thoroughbreds. For a $50 donation per person, up to six fans can watch Aiello call a race from the announcer's booth with the proceeds going to the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance (TAA).

“The TAA is very grateful to the team at Gulfstream Park and Peter Aiello for this unique and fun way to raise funds and awareness for aftercare. We hope fans of racing will embrace this experience to have an exciting birds-eye view of Thoroughbred racing while joining Pete and supporting a great cause,” said Stacie Clark-Rogers, TAA's Operation Consultant.

Aiello, a native of West Palm Beach, grew up attending the races at Gulfstream, Hialeah Park and Calder Race Course. A graduate of the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program, he called races at River Downs, California fairs and Oaklawn Park before arriving at Gulfstream in 2016.

“I love meeting racing fans and I applaud the efforts of the TAA so it is a perfect marriage. I look forward to showing everyone a great time raising money for a great cause,” Aiello said.

For more information contact Stacy Nicks at stacy.nicks@gulfstreampark.com.

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Week In Review: Racing On Christmas A Thing of the Past, But Legend Lives On

The annual Dec. 26 start of the Santa Anita season has a natural, anticipatory, turn-the-page vibe to it. But this mark-your-calendar Opening Day mainstay hasn't always been a post-holiday tradition. Although Santa Anita has kicked off its winter/spring meet on the day after Christmas every year since 1977, the track originally opened in 1934 on Christmas Day itself, and did so for the first four years of its existence.

“Filmdom entirely forgot its world of make-believe to migrate to the Santa Anita track yesterday for the renewal of horse racing in Los Angeles,” the Los Angeles Times gushed when reporting on the huge turnout of Hollywood movie stars and celebrities when Santa Anita held its first-ever races on Dec. 25, 1934.

“They rubbed elbows with Angelinos and society folk, and jostled through the crowd of 30,000 spectators to get a hot dog or place a bet, and joined in the cheer that swept over the giant racing plant as the horses left the barrier for the first race,” the front-page spread stated.

History tells us that way back when, Santa Anita wasn't alone in racing on Christmas Day.

Thumb through chart books and old newspaper clippings, and you'll get a flavor of when Christmas in North America was more of a social holiday than a commercial one; when going to the races on Dec. 25 was a festive outing centered on celebrating with friends and strangers alike.

As far back as the 1880s and early into the 20th Century, Christmas Day racing was routine at major warm-weather North American venues such as Oakland, California; Havana, Cuba; Juarez and Tijuana in Mexico, plus at other, long-gone Thoroughbred outposts like Jefferson in Louisiana and Savannah, Georgia.

There is even evidence that “outlaw” Thoroughbred tracks in bone-chilling climes like New Jersey, Illinois, and Missouri raced on Christmas through roughly 1900, purely because people would turn out to bet on the low-level unsanctioned racing those venues offered. Action, after all, was action.

By 1938 though, Santa Anita opted to switch off of Christmas Day racing in favor of opening on New Year's Eve. That experiment didn't last, and for the better part of the next 15 seasons or so, the SoCal track's start date fluctuated within the last week of December depending on how the calendar fell.

The first Dec. 26 Santa Anita opener was not until 1949, according to a retrospective the Los Angeles Times ran in 2012: “Since 1952, the day after Christmas has been Santa Anita's opening day in all but five seasons, and all seasons since 1977. Now to open any other day would seem sacrilegious.”

The Fair Grounds in New Orleans and Tropical Park in Florida were the two main tracks on the continent that continued to card Christmas Day racing through the middle of the 20th Century.

Eventually, Florida's tracks became the only torch-carriers for Christmas Day racing in America. Calder Race Course embraced the tradition after Tropical closed in 1972, and Hialeah Park even briefly gave it a go when it reopened from closure in 1991.

Yes, Virginia, There Is…

The now-defunct Calder also often raced on Christmas Eve, too. The finale on Dec. 24, 1992, was a $7,500 claimer in which an aptly named mare called Silent Knight got pounded in the betting to 7-5 favoritism. She won, of course. The margin was a nose (presumably red).

You'd think Silent Knight's victory might go down in history as the all-time holiday hunch play.

It isn't.

That distinction belongs to a 9-year-old Canadian-bred named Santa Claus, who romped home first in a Christmas Eve claimer at the Fair Grounds in 1976, delivering a $7.20 win mutuel to his merry backers.

After arriving in the paddock with his tail tied in red and white ribbons and a festive stocking cap perched atop his head, Santa Claus trailed until the final turn in a 1 1/16 miles route race, then rushed up the rail with a flourish turning for home.

“Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus…” the track announcer began crooning, with the crowd laughing and joining in to sing the carol, according to the Associated Press account of the race.

The Grinch Known as Simulcasting…

You can bet that Hall-of-Fame jockey Mike Smith remembers the Christmas Day he spent at Calder in 1993.

Smith, 28 at the time and just emerging as a top New York-based rider, flew to Florida because he had a chance to tie Pat Day's then-record of 60 stakes wins in a calendar year. Smith caught a big break when the holiday feature, the Tropical Park Oaks, got split into two divisions at entry time. He landed on the two favorites-and in the winner's circle-with both mounts.

“Someone up there must be looking out for me, and these horses must know,” Smith said after the wins.

Five days later, back at Aqueduct, Smith would win his 61st stakes of the year, giving him sole possession of the record (which has since been Scrooged by several other riders). The feat helped him earn his first Eclipse Award as the nation's outstanding jockey.

The following year, the 1994 Christmas Day program at Calder would turn out to be its last.

While the holiday cards were considered decent on-track days in terms of attendance and handle (6,473 people turned out to bet $925,632 on-track in 1994), by 1995 Calder management decided that it would rather forego racing on the holiday to be open the day after, when more off-track betting parlors and simulcast tracks nationwide would be open to import the signal.

Today, Camarero Race Track in Puerto Rico is the only North American track with regular racing on Christmas Day.

At all the stateside venues, not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.

Yet it turned out that a sizable chunk of customers cried “Humbug!” when Calder pulled the plug on Christmas Day racing.

As Calder president Ken Dunn told the Miami Herald in 1995, for many people, the racetrack was a refuge (fast-forward to 2022: it still is). Particularly for the elderly who might not have family, going racing was a way to fill the hours.

Plus, Dunn added, “There are a lot of people who don't celebrate Christmas.”

Dunn's predecessor, the late Kenny Noe, who oversaw Calder during its decades-long run of holiday racing, told the Herald in that same article he had a different theory about why Christmas was so popular with racegoers.

“A lot of men would show up at the track and tell me their wives had told them to get the hell out of the house but be home by 4 o'clock for dinner,” said Noe, an old-school track exec who was never one to mince words.

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Majority Of Former Calder Race Course Acreage To Be Sold; Churchill Keeping Casino

Churchill Downs Incorporated announced that it has signed an agreement to sell 115.7 acres of land near Calder Casino in Miami Gardens, Fla., for $291 million or approximately $2.5 million per acre. CDI has agreed to sell the land to Link Logistics, one of the premier owners of logistics real estate assets, established in 2019 by Blackstone.

The closing of the sale of the property is subject to the satisfaction of various closing conditions. The Company anticipates closing the sale of the property in the first half of 2022. CDI is planning to use certain proceeds of the sale to purchase or invest in replacement property that qualifies as an Internal Revenue Code §1031 transaction.

Following the closing of this transaction, CDI will retain ownership of approximately 54 acres of the current 170-acre parcel of land on which the Company's wholly-owned Calder Casino sits. The Company may sell 15-20 acres of land along NW 27th Ave. in the Miami Gardens area in the future for retail development.

Beginning in 2014, Churchill Downs Inc. leased the Calder track and a portion of the stable area to Gulfstream Park, which operated a race meet there under the name Gulfstream Park West. The arrangement allowed Churchill Downs Inc. to continue operations of the Calder Casino, with a portion of the gaming revenue earmarked for purses. Races were run without a functioning grandstand and there was virtually no on-track attendance.

Churchill Downs Inc. acquired a dormant jai alai permit in 2019 and secured a favorable ruling from an administrative law judge to transfer the Calder Casino to that permit from Thoroughbred racing. That doomed racing at Calder once the lease expired with Gulfstream Park. The final race was run at Calder in November 2020.

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The Bitter End: Arrogance Of Arlington Park Management Washes Away Memories Of A Better Time

The new millennium was not kind to horse racing in Chicagoland.

In 2000, the Bidwill family's Sportsman's Park, the bullring in the gritty south side suburb of Cicero that for years hosted both Standardbred and Thoroughbred racing, had just been transformed to an auto track that planned to continue offering Thoroughbred races on dirt spread over a concrete oval. That absurd experiment lasted a couple years. The auto track was a dud and a financial disaster. The dirt track was unsafe. Sportsman's ran its last horse race in 2002 and is now the site of several big box stores.

And 2000 was also the year Richard Duchossois merged his family-owned Arlington Park in the northwest Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights into the portfolio of the publicly traded Churchill Downs Inc. Then under the leadership of Thomas Meeker, Churchill Downs had been on something of an acquisition spree, having just purchased Calder Race Course near Miami, Fla., and Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif.

We know how those acquisitions have worked out for the Thoroughbred industry. Meeker left Churchill Downs in 2006, one year after Hollywood Park was sold to a land development company that would close the track in 2013 and construct an NFL football stadium in its place.

Calder's grandstand was torn down in 2015 and the racing surface and a portion of the stables were leased to The Stronach Group, owner of Gulfstream Park, to run a spectator-less meet re-branded as Gulfstream Park West. That lease expired last year and Calder/GP West is now history. So, too, are the purse supplements that came from the Calder Casino, for which horsemen helped Churchill Downs Inc. fight for approval in a 2008 referendum.

It's difficult to imagine how there is a future for Arlington Park as a racetrack after the current meet ends next month. Churchill Downs Inc. is majority owner of Rivers Casino 10 miles away and turned down the opportunity created in 2019 by gambling expansion legislation that would have permitted an on-site casino at Arlington. Illinois breeders, owners and trainers were stunned and felt betrayed when Arlington said it would not apply for a casino license and instead sell the property for development. For years, decades even, horsepeople stood side by side with Arlington representatives in the state capitol in Springfield, lobbying for legislation to permit slots or casinos at racetracks.

Arlington did not apply for 2022 racing dates and it would not be in Churchill Downs Inc's best interests as a casino company to sell the track to anyone who would offer pari-mutuel wagering on horse racing. That would be competition for the gambling dollar and conceivably could hurt Rivers Casino's business.

The Carey family's Hawthorne Race Course appears to be Illinois racing's last hope – unless you count old Fairmount Park in southern Illinois, which has been rebranded as FanDuel Sports Book and Horse Racing.

Hawthorne, which sat directly adjacent to Sportsman's Park, announced plans for a $500 million casino expansion following the 2019 gambling legislation. But construction on the casino was halted in April, with no public explanation or a timeline for completion.

Even if the Hawthorne casino is completed, the situation is far from ideal. Hawthorne is now the only track hosting Standardbred racing in the Chicago area, and this creates not only a potential conflict over racing dates between the two breeds, but future revenue from the casino earmarked for purses will have to be divided between Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds. The 2019 legislation permitted a new harness track/casino to be built in an area south of Chicago, but to date neither a suitable investor or property has been approved.

Arlington's racing days are dwindling down to a precious few, The palatial grandstand remains one of the great wonders of the North American racing world, though it's obvious the once pristine aesthetics and maintenance standards set by the very hands-on Richard Duchossois have fallen considerably as he approaches the century mark in years. Unsightly weeds growing throughout the plant are just one of the eyesores that wouldn't have been there a decade ago. In fact, back then, Duchossois himself might have grabbed a weed wacker to show the maintenance crew how it's done, just as he took control of traffic flow into the parking lot one Arlington Million day not that many years ago.

Speaking of Arlington Million Day, or whatever it was called this year after the signature race's purse was slashed and renamed the Mr. D. Stakes in honor of Duchossois, how about that Tony Petrillo, the track's president?

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Based on reporting by Jim O'Donnell in the Daily Herald (apparently the only Chicago-area newspaper to cover this year's three Grade 1 races, with both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times ignoring them), Petrillo had quite the meltdown, lashing out at media members who did come to cover the races. According to O'Donnell and confirmed by several writers and photographers from horse racing publications, Petrillo would not allow photographers, other than the track photographer, to get in position to photograph any of the big turf races.

After the day's final race was run, buoyed with members of the security staff, Petrillo cleared out the press box while those same writers and photographers were trying to finish their assignments and send their stories and pictures to their respective publications.  Petrillo even told one photographer who happened to be on assignment for a Churchill Downs Inc. subsidiary, that she was “banned for life” from Arlington Park.

It's the same treatment owners and trainers have been receiving from Arlington management in recent years.

There was a time when Arlington Park's press box was as welcoming and friendly as any track in the country. It wasn't just the comfortable accommodations or the excellent meals that were served to grateful writers and photographers. More importantly, Richard Duchossois would walk through the press box and thank each member of the media individually for coming to Arlington Park, asking them if there's anything they needed.

How times have changed.

My gut feeling is that this is the end of the road for Arlington Park, the track where I fell in love with racing in the 1970s. It's been a long, slow and painful death to observe since Duchossois relinquished complete control of Arlington in 2000. I may not agree with them, but I understand business decisions and fiduciary responsibilities that drive publicly traded companies like Churchill Downs Inc. What I don't understand is the arrogance and nastiness from Arlington's management that has accompanied the track's tragic fall.

I had always thought the final days of Arlington Park would be bittersweet, a mix of sorrow with the great memories furnished by the horses and people who put on the show for so many decades. But the architects of what seems destined to be this wonderful track's final chapter seem hell bent on making sure it's a bitter end.

 

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