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‘It’s Not Just The Big Guys’: Historical Horse Racing Supports Small Kentucky Tracks, Horsemen

As both the Kentucky State Senate and Kentucky House Committee for Licensing, Occupations and Administration Regulations passed SB 120 this week, Turfway Park horsemen are making their case for the importance of protecting Historical Horse Racing. They say protecting HHR, as it is known, is critical to saving Kentucky jobs, including their own.

HHR's future in Kentucky is uncertain following an opinion issued by the Kentucky Supreme Court in September. At risk is a significant revenue stream that has produced some of the best racing purses in the country, prompted track owners to make considerable facility investments and bolstered a year-round racing circuit on which Kentucky horsemen have come to depend.

Trainer Buff Bradley, a Kentucky native, left the state 11 years ago to winter in Florida and then New Orleans because purses had gotten so bad at Turfway Park. After purses increased last year, he convinced owners to stick around Kentucky.

“I was hoping Kentucky was going to be a stronger circuit, with Ellis doing well,” said Bradley. “It really looked like Turfway was going to be on the rise with Churchill buying it and purses increasing. Now I'm rethinking, 'Uh oh. I came here and it might have been too soon,' because things aren't looking as well with Historic Horse Racing machines maybe not going through. That's going to be the big question.

“Kentucky can be a great circuit,” he said. “I know last year everybody was thrilled. You've got owners who see a rising Kentucky, even with Ellis Park and Turfway's purses being better, they can afford to stay around here. And they live here. If they can do that, they're going to go to the sales and buy more horses. If we can keep more horses around here, we can keep everybody busy – more jobs. There's a lot to it.”

Bradley employees 12 people in his 20-horse stable at Turfway.

“The money has made a big difference,” he said. “It's not like we're getting rich off this, but it makes it affordable for people to stay and to meet people to buy horses. It's become a year-round circuit in Kentucky, which is a big plus. Because you keep the people here. This is our home.

“If we don't have HHR, I can see racing really decreasing here in the state. Horse racing will go down to Keeneland and Churchill basically. I can't see how Turfway, Ellis Park – those two tracks for sure – and even Kentucky Downs could survive. We'd probably decrease the number of days even at Keeneland and Churchill. And when that happens, it's tough to get stables to come in because there isn't going to be much racing. They're going to go to New York and Florida, areas where they have racing throughout the year.”

Groom Toni Ouzts, who has two children with her husband, veteran jockey Perry Ouzts, is concerned that if the Kentucky House does not pass the HHR bill, life will be more difficult for them.

“I need this job,” she said. “It's my livelihood. It's my passion. I'd be lost without it. And my husband would be out of work, too, if we would not have Turfway Park.”

Asked about people who would say that HHR just makes rich people richer, she said: “No. This is keeping me in a job. It's keeping my husband in a job, people I work with every day. We work seven days a week. This is more than a job. It's everything. My sister and I work here 'rubbing' horses together. And even her husband works on the front side. It's giving everyone a job.”

When discussing the potential of Turfway likely shutting down unless the HRR bill passes, she said she is surprised that Turfway's existence is even in doubt and it makes her sad.

“It's scary. It really is scary.”

Turfway “gives so many people job,” she said. “So many people would be out of work. Just think of the hay and straw people, the feed man. There's so much involved in horse racing. It's not just the big guys.”

Trainer Jeff Greenhill left a career as chemical engineer in Alabama to go into horse racing. He's been training about 25 years, wintering at Turfway Park throughout.

“This is the place that the little guy survives — here and Ellis Park,” Greenhill said. “There are 1,100 horses here, and I've got 18 and I have eight employees. You can do the math: There are a whole lot of people here employed by the horse-racing industry. Unless purses stay at a reasonable level, I'm out of business or I'm moving to New York, Florida or Indiana.”

Veterinarian John Piehowicz, who has served clients on the local racing circuit since the early 1990s, also sees difficult choices ahead without historic horse racing.

“If SB120 isn't passed then I think this (Turfway Park) is done,” he said.

Piehowicz says racing “is the one industry where trickle-down economics works. If you look around the racetrack here, there are a lot of people who depend on the horses, depend on the income – whether it's a Sunoco station around the corner where half the people who work here go and buy their snacks or the local community. When this place closes it's going impact more than horse racing in the state of Kentucky.”

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Dale Romans Op/Ed: Historical Horse Racing a Game Changer

As a second-generation horse trainer and Kentuckian, my entire life has been spent in Thoroughbred racing. I've seen Kentucky racing at its finest, and I've seen how quickly out-of-state competition can render us increasingly irrelevant. Right now Kentucky is at the top. But it doesn't have to stay that way.

I currently have 50 employees and do business with more than 100 vendors in Kentucky alone. Without Historical Horse Racing (HHR) revenue supplementing the purses for which our horses compete, many of those jobs will have to leave the state, as will our business with all those area vendors.

People forget, but it wasn't that long ago that Kentucky racing was badly hemorrhaging amid regional and national competition for horses. As more horse owners and trainers opted to race at tracks with purses fueled by slots and casino gaming, Ellis Park's summer meet and Turfway Park's winter racing were on life support. Even legendary Churchill Downs and Keeneland struggled with a profound horse shortage. Our breeding farms suffered from an exodus of mares they'd previously boarded, leaving the Bluegrass for states with more meaningful incentives–supported by revenue from racinos and casinos– for horses foaled in those jurisdictions.

First introduced by then-struggling Kentucky Downs in 2011, Historical Horse Racing proved the game-changer for good, reversing the downward spiral for Kentucky's signature industry. HHR is not a subsidy for horse racing. It's an innovative, racing-based product that reinvests in our iconic industry. This is one of those win-win-win situations that has benefitted the whole state. It has sparked significant economic development and creates and preserves jobs.

Purses are the universal language of horsemen. We follow the money. And where our horses go, so go the jobs. American horse racing is not the sport of kings. It's the sport of thousands of stables operating as local businesses employing real people in communities across the country.

Horse racing is an extremely labor-intensive business; you're never going to automate caring for a horse. And that's a good thing. We want it to be labor intensive and give people the opportunity to work in our industry.

Because of Historical Horse Racing and combined with our quality of life and affordable housing, Kentucky is now the mecca for horsemen. Trainers and jockeys on both coasts are increasing their presence in Kentucky, if not making it their primary base. Ellis Park and Turfway's barns are full for their meets, as are area training centers. The horses occupying those stalls reflect added jobs.

Within the short period of time in which it has been up and running, HHR has completely changed the dynamics of racing on a national level, with Kentucky once more at the forefront.

This provides a huge boost for the entire economy of Kentucky, not only horse racing. Just ask the mayors and county judge executives in Henderson and Simpson counties what HHR has meant for their communities. Historical Horse Racing has brought entertainment dollars back to Kentucky, with HHR operations themselves employing 1,400 people in six cities. Our racetracks have invested nearly $1 billion the past 10 years in capital projects with another $600 million planned.

Make no mistake, that will change for the worse if the Kentucky Legislature doesn't act to protect HHR. It needs to follow the simple blueprint the Kentucky Supreme Court provided to address its constitutionality concern.

It is not hyperbole to say three of our five Thoroughbred tracks will close without HHR: Ellis Park, Turfway Park and Kentucky Downs. Harness racing will be history. Jobs will evaporate, millions of economic development and tourism dollars lost.

Whether you approve of alternative gaming or not, it is right here in our market–just across the border in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia and not far away in Pennsylvania. The majority of Kentucky's population can get to a casino to gamble within 30 minutes.

Kentucky's horse industry has a $5.2 billion economic impact and employs 60,000 people directly or indirectly. The commonwealth's racetracks pay more than $100 million annually in state and local taxes. Out-of-state money flows into Kentucky's coffers as a result of horse racing and its economic driver, HHR.

Do we want to needlessly sacrifice that?

It's important to have a year-round, consistent racing circuit in Kentucky. Without HHR, Kentucky racing will be an afterthought in a very quick period of time. Legislators must ask themselves: Can we afford that?

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Decision to Close HHR has brought Urgency to the Forefront

Two days after Keeneland Association and Red Mile announced they would be shutting their joint historical horse racing (HHR) venture at the Lexington harness racino while imploring the Kentucky legislature to provide “more clarity” regarding the disputed legal status of HHR, Vince Gabbert, Keeneland's vice president and chief operating officer, was called upon during the Jan. 26 Kentucky Thoroughbred Development Fund (KTDF) teleconference to explain why that decision was made in the absence of any formal order from state officials to cease HHR, which is ongoing at other licensed locations despite an apparent dead-end to the case in the courts.

“We did, as you can imagine, some significant research and going back and forth to ensure that we were making the right decision as it relates to our joint entities between us and Red Mile,” Gabbard said. “I will tell you that we feel like we took a very conservative approach.

“But I think in every way possible we've seen the measures that we took over the weekend have helped bring the urgency even more to the forefront than what we had so that the legislature understands the impact that not only racing, but HHR has on the economy in the commonwealth,” Gabbert continued. “And hopefully, we will see a legislative remedy in the next couple of weeks.”

The KTDF, which is funded by three-quarters of 1% of all money wagered on both live Thoroughbred races and HHR gaming, plus 2% of all money wagered on Thoroughbred races via inter-track wagering and whole-card simulcasting, has had a rough go of trying to supplement purses at Kentucky's five Thoroughbred racetracks over the past year.

The COVID-19 pandemic first wreaked havoc with Kentucky's ability to generate purses derived from gaming revenue last March, and the effects are still causing major ripples because of spectator-free race meets and capacity limitations at gaming facilities.

Then last week, on Jan. 21, the Kentucky Supreme Court denied a petition for rehearing its 7-0 Sept. 24 judgment that told a lower court to re-examine the legality of historical horse race (HHR) gaming in the commonwealth.

Although the Supreme Court case only involves HHR machines made by Exacta Systems, whose machines are approved for use at Red Mile, Kentucky Downs and Ellis Park, the gaming systems operate in broadly the same manner throughout Kentucky, meaning that a precedent established for one version is likely to affect all forms of HHR gaming.

The racing industry's urgent focus is now on Kentucky lawmakers to legalize HHR, but roadblocks loom in the form of conservative resistance to the expansion of gambling in the state and the fact that the legislature only meets for 30 days in odd-numbered years, with the 2021 session scheduled to end Mar. 30.

The articulation of Keeneland's position and the political leverage it could possibly generate came several hours after a dire Tuesday morning announcement by Ellis Park that its racino could go out of business without the legalization of HHR.

“Without the revenue associated with HHR, there is no realistic path forward for Ellis Park,” Ellis general manager Jeffery Inman said in a statement released to Kentucky's Eyewitness News. “Were we to rely only on racing and simulcast revenue, we could not even keep this 99-year-old facility maintained, let alone provide the financial investment necessary to prepare for and conduct a world-class live race meet. Without HHR support, purses would drop dramatically, resulting in a greatly diminished live racing product. In short, the loss of HHR revenue at Ellis Park would likely threaten the very survival of one of Kentucky's iconic racing venues.”

It's also been nearly four months now since Churchill Downs Inc., (CDI), the gaming corporation that owns the tracks and HHR licenses associated with Churchill Downs Racetrack and Turfway Park, has already halted reconstruction on its demolished Turfway grandstand, vowing not to continue the planned rebuild until HHR's legality gets sorted out.

As Bill Landes III, the chairman of the KTDF advisory committee, glumly put it during Tuesday's meeting, “As if we all don't know, we could use some remediation of HHR.”

But outside of writing letters seeking help to elected and appointed officials in Kentucky (which the KTDF board voted unanimously to do), there were no other concrete ideas proposed to put HHR back on firmer legal footing.

KTDF board member J. David Richardson suggested emphasizing in those letters that “our perspective is a bit unique in that we actually delve into what [HHR revenue] means to Kentucky racing, probably more deeply than virtually any group, I think.”

Richardson said it was important “to let people know that the stewardship of these monies are very closely monitored by this committee and by our staff and are really appropriately used.

“This isn't 'funny money,'” Richardson summed up. “I think it's important to reiterate every now and then how closely we follow every dime.”

To that end, the KTDF voted unanimously to forward approval recommendations to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission for $2,061,900 in KTDF funds for Keeneland's spring meet and a range of $4.3 to $4.9 million for the Churchill Downs meet that spans April-June.

Gabbert said that Keeneland's “goal, from an overall purse standpoint, would be to be on par with where we were in spring of 2019.” He did not cite specific dollar amounts.

Ben Huffman, who serves in the dual capacities of racing secretary at Keeneland and the director of racing at Churchill, said that for Keeneland, “I'm kind of putting on the finishing touches of the condition book; actually may go to the printer with it in about 10 days or so. But the maiden special weights will be $79,000. And the 'non-winners of two' allowance race will be $81,000 at Keeneland this spring.”

As for Churchill's levels, Huffman said, “we haven't even met here collectively about spring purses yet,” but that he expects those figures to be available by mid-February.

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Without Historical Horse Racing, ‘There Is No Realistic Path Forward For Ellis Park’

Officials at Ellis Park in Henderson, Ky. are concerned that the loss of historical horse racing in the state could mean the end of racing at the Western Kentucky track, reports Eyewitness News.

“Without the revenue associated with HHR, there is no realistic path forward for Ellis Park,” Jeffery Inman told Eyewitness News. “Were we to rely only on Racing and Simulcast revenue, we could not even keep this 99 year old facility maintained, let alone provide the financial investment necessary to prepare for and conduct a world-class live race meet. Without HHR support, purses would drop dramatically, resulting in a greatly diminished live racing product. In short, the loss of HHR revenue at Ellis Park would likely threaten the very survival of one of Kentucky's iconic racing venues.”

The Kentucky Supreme Court issued a brief statement last Thursday in which it declined to reconsider its unanimous decision on historical horse racing machines issued on Sept. 24, 2020. In response, both Keeneland and Red Mile temporarily shut down historical racing operations over the weekend.