Turf Paradise: Guest Race Caller Dani Jackson Will Share The Mic With Craig Braddick Next Week

Dani Jackson, a voice familiar to many racing fans in the United Kingdom, will be the guest race caller at Turf Paradise from Jan. 17 to Jan. 21. Dani, from Manchester, UK, flies out to the Phoenix, Ariz. track at the invitation of regular Turf Paradise race caller, Craig Braddick, who has been mentoring Dani for the past six months.

Dani Jackson works for William Hill as a TV host and greyhound racing commentator, and she is often seen on Racing Post social media videos previewing top greyhound races. Recently, Dani has also auditioned with Racetech in the UK for a position as a race caller.

In June, Jackson responded to a Tweet from Craig Braddick saying that if there were any aspiring female race callers out there who could show they could do the job, he would be happy to have them come to Turf Paradise.

“I never thought in a million years that Tweet would bring Dani over to Turf Paradise all the way from the UK,” Braddick said. “But as soon as I heard her practice race calls from tracks in the UK, I knew she was a talent that deserved an opportunity, and I am really looking forward to her taking the microphone at Turf Paradise. I think racing fans everywhere are going to be very impressed with her skills!”

Jackson said she has been practicing calling live races at Turf Paradise off the monitor in preparation for her visit.

“I have got to know many of the horses and the jockey silks as well as the way the track plays,” said Jackson. “Craig has been tremendously encouraging – critical when needed but always challenging me to do better. I am really looking forward to calling the races at Turf Paradise next week.”

Braddick and Jackson will split race calling duties, and one day Jackson will call the entire card. Jackson will also be previewing races on the simulcast feed when the horses are in the paddock.

“Turf Paradise continues to attract horseplayers not only from the United States but also around the world,” Braddick said. “In fact, many people may say after Dani has been here, I am only the second-best British race caller Turf Paradise has had!”

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Sky Racing World Begins Commingling Of US, Australian Wagering Pools

Sky Racing World has announced a significant enhancement to its content portfolio of International racing by facilitating the commingling of USA wagering pools into Tabcorp hosted pools in Australia (NSW Tote). Starting last month, the commingling of pools became available on Australian Greyhound racing for the first time ever and added to the list of innovative developments from the Australian Greyhound Racing Industry.

The commingling of pools provides improved liquidity, greater stability of odds and a more attractive wagering proposition to USA players overall. It is also anticipated that commingling will enable the number of Australian Greyhound meetings offered each day to increase, which will be a boost to the entertainment options available to USA fans of Greyhound racing and the growth of the Australian industry.

Sky Racing World has distributed the simulcast of Australian Greyhound racing in the USA since June 2020, and it has quickly become popular with USA Greyhound racing fans. Audiences have been able to experience the quality of the Australian Greyhound racing product from a variety of locations across Australia, including the states of Victoria (Melbourne) and New South Wales (Sydney), with feature racing from city tracks like The Meadows and Wentworth Park. Now, they'll also get the added benefit of commingling and improved liquidity. 

The last year has been huge for innovation within Greyhound Racing Victoria led by its Board and Chair Peita Duncan. In addition to commingling, it has launched a variety of measures to improve the sport, like The Phoenix, which is the world's only slot race for greyhounds. With eight slots available at $75,000 per slot, there's over $1,145,000 in total prize money to win, along with the winner going home with $750,000 and it run at The Meadows on Saturday, December 18th.

The GRV has been focused on the adoption of greyhounds, with around 3,000 greyhounds being rehomed to loving families in 2020-21. They've also recently launched a new Desexing and Dental Scheme for retired greyhounds, where the GRV will pay for desexing and dental work (up to $400 for a male and up to $500 for a female) to assist in a Greyhound's rehoming.

The Welfare and integrity of greyhounds are paramount for the GRV as a regulator and they've been concentrating on major infrastructure projects that focus on safer racing. An example is the Traralgon track, which is the first of its kind with a redeveloped 'J' design. It's designed to reduce physical stress on greyhounds during their races featuring one turn and a 300-metre straight track, according to research conducted by the University of Technology Sydney. The Victorian Government has invested $3 million dollars, while Greyhound Racing Victoria topped up the investment with $2 million dollars, making it a $5 million dollar project. 

On June 18th, the GRV also ran the first Pink Diamond night at the Bendigo Greyhound Racing Club. The series ran at race clubs all over Victoria to reward Victorian bred greyhounds of all ages and abilities, and around $790,000AU in prize money and breeders' bonus were handed to Victorian participants.

All of these impressive feats have brought forward a sport that US players can now access the Australian Greyhound wagering pools (NSW Tote) via Advance-Deposit Wagering (ADW) partners who offer wagering on Greyhounds.

David Haslett, CEO of Sky Racing World, stated: “The commingling of pools provides a significant boost to wagering play on Australian Greyhound racing and it wouldn't have happened without the support of the Australian Greyhound Racing industry, particularly Peita Duncan (Chair, Greyhound Racing Victoria) who helped drive the initiative. Last year, we were proud to introduce the simulcast of Australian Greyhound racing to the USA, but this will take participation to the next level. It is also a great milestone for the Sky Racing World business, Tabcorp and the Australian Greyhound racing industry and its state jurisdictions.”

All races are live-streamed on the new Sky Racing World Appskyracingworld.com and major ADW platforms. Fans can also get free access to past performances and picks at skyracingworld.com

Sky Racing World is a subsidiary of Tabcorp, Australia's biggest wagering and entertainment company. It retains the exclusive rights to distribute live racing from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan (NAR) to territories across the Americas and the Caribbean. It also remains the leading digital source for premium tipping content from the Southern Hemisphere's leading race markets and live video broadcasts. 

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Florida Legislature Hands Sports Betting To Seminoles, Permits Non-Thoroughbred Tracks To Decouple From Gaming

On the final day of a special session, Florida legislators on Wednesday approved three separate gambling measures that will strengthen the Seminole tribe's dominant position in the gambling market, allow non-Thoroughbred pari-mutuel facilities to decouple casinos and card rooms from their racing and jai-alai operations, and create a five-member Gaming Commission that will replace the state's Division of Pari-Mutuel Wagering.

The net result will mean more competition for the state's two remaining Thoroughbred tracks, Tampa Bay Downs in Oldsmar and Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach. Horsemen fear that will lead to lower purse money for Gulfstream Park and a reduction in racing days, according to Stephen Screnci, president of the Florida Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association.

The bill that garnered the most attention is approval of a 30-year compact between Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Seminoles, giving the tribe a monopoly on sports betting and permitting the addition of three new casinos on the site of the existing Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, approximately 10 miles northwest of Gulfstream Park. The state gets $500 million a year from the the deal for the next five years.

The Seminoles will have a monopoly on sports betting, both at the seven Florida casinos they currently operate and via mobile applications. Pari-mutuel facilities may enter into agreements with the Seminoles to offer sports betting and split revenue with the tribe.

That portion of the legislation, along with language that could bring a new casino to Miami-Dade County off tribal land, is likely to be challenged in court by gambling opponents who say the bill violates a 2018 statewide ballot initiative that blocked any further expansion of gambling without voter approval.

The bill to approve the Seminoles compact passed 38-1 in the Senate and 97-17 in the House.

The decoupling bill likely will end live racing at South Florida's Pompano Park, the state's only harness track that opened in 1964 and is now known as Isle Casino Pompano, a Caesars Entertainment property. A last-minute amendment in the Florida House version of the bill to exempt harness racing from the decoupling law was stripped in the final version that passed the Senate by a 39-0 vote and the House in a 73-43 vote.

Hialeah Park may also have seen its last race. The historic track that once hosted South Florida's best winter Thoroughbred meet has been operating its casino since 2010 in connection with a Quarter Horse permit that began with competitive racing sanctioned by the Florida Quarter Horse Association. Those races were replaced by match races that were run so that Hialeah fulfilled its casino license obligation to conduct races as defined by Florida statute. That will no longer be necessary.

The idea of acquiring licenses for card rooms and simulcasting by running horse races began in Florida's panhandle when an operation in Gadsden County offered pari-mutuel wagering on barrel races. After a court struck down that as not fitting the definition of pari-mutuel races,  lawyers familiar with state regulations came up with the idea of match races – sometimes involving flag drop starts and slow horses walking or trotting down a dirt path. Remarkably, that passed legal muster and Quarter Horse permits sprung up in several other locations around the state, with farcical races giving operators the legal right to open card rooms and simulcast parlors.

Under the bill passed on Wednesday, all those facilities may now end the sham horse races but continue to operate their card rooms and simulcasting. The same is true of the state's jai-alai frontons, which may also be decoupled. Greyhound racing became extinct at the end of 2020 after Florida voters approved a ballot initiative to ban the sport, so those tracks already have decoupled from their card rooms and simulcasting.

Screnci, the HBPA president, said revenue from slots operations to purses – currently about 20% of total purses – will fall. Currently, he said, horsemen receive about $9 million annually from the Calder Casino, but the contract with owner Churchill Downs Inc. (CDI) is set to expire on July 31. CDI previously received state approval to couple its Calder Casino operations with a jai-alai permit it acquired, allowing the company to end live racing at the track that in recent years has been leased to Gulfstream Park's owners and rebranded as Gulfstream Park West. The decoupling bill will allow CDI to stop conducting jai-alai and keep its casino open. Screnci said he has had talks with Bill Carstanjen, CEO of CDI, about the company continuing to contribute to purses, since horsemen were instrumental in Calder getting its casino license.

According to Screnci, the Gulfstream Park slots contribute about $6 million annually to purses, and that could fall as the other casinos in the region (including the former Hollywood greyhound track now known as The Big Easy casino and located just over one mile north) become more profitable.

The tax rate on slot operations run by the Seminoles is 12.5%, Screnci said, with Gulfstream Park paying a 35% tax rate.

Horsemen lobbied in Tallahassee for concessions for Thoroughbred racing, but those talks fell on “deaf ears,” Screnci said.

“We asked for a purse pool, with the decoupled permit holders contributing a portion of their funds now that they won't have to spend anything on racing,” he said. “That didn't get a lot of support. There still could be some appropriations from compact money that goes to the state. That's not dead. This compact doesn't discuss any appropriations of money. We might be able to get in the mix there.”

Screnci said the compact between the tribe and DeSantis permits Miami-Dade and Broward pari-mutuels up to a 5% tax break, but not until 2023.

“It's a bad compact,” he said, adding that even with the addition of new casinos and sports betting the state is only getting an additional $100 million per year compared to the old compact.

His fear is that with Calder no longer an option as a racetrack and purse revenue expected to decline, Gulfstream Park will have to cut racing dates. “We can only go so low (on purses),” he said. “If we lose too many racing days, the lure of year-round racing goes away. That's one way we've managed to keep stables here in October and November, by racing so many days.”

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The Week in Review: Greyhound Racing Nears Finish Line in Florida

About 50 miles up I-95 from Gulfstream Park, Abbi’s Frontman won the $100,000 Legacy Grand Championship Saturday night at the Palm Beach Kennel Club, the richest race in the track’s history. But this was not a night to celebrate. With the conclusion of the card, there were only 18 days of racing left until the greyhound track would be forced to close after operating for some 90 years. In 2018, Florida voters approved an amendment that made wagering on dog racing in the state illegal, effectively banning the sport. It goes into effect Jan. 1.

It was the latest and most important victory to date by animal rights activists who have been so successful in their efforts to end the sport that it is close to extinction in the U.S. It is a story of what they are capable of accomplishing and one Thoroughbred racing can ill afford to ignore.

As recently as 2000, there were 45 dog tracks running in the U.S. in 14 states. There were 17 tracks alone in Florida. Once the Florida tracks close, there will be only four greyhound tracks left in the U.S., two of which are slated to close at the end of 2022. The last holdout will be West Virginia, which has two greyhound tracks.

Even Congress has gotten involved with the introduction of H.R. 7826, the Greyhound Protection Act of 2020, which would make it a federal crime to engage in commercial dog racing. Within a few years, the sport will likely have disappeared all together in this country

“The animal rights people did away with the circus, they’ve done away with us and they’re working on SeaWorld,” said Richard Winning, the CEO of Derby Lane in St. Petersburg. “They even were strong enough to get them to take the bars off the front of the box of animal crackers. Animal rights issues are a big thing, especially to the younger generations.”

In some ways, greyhound racing has been its own worst enemy, providing plenty of ammunition for its critics. For decades, thousands of healthy dogs were put down, sometimes in a grisly manner, once their racing days ended. The same fate often awaited other dogs who never made it to the racetrack. In 2002, the New York Times and others reported on the story of a former security guard at a track in Pensacola, Florida who was arrested for the killing of as many as 3,000 dogs. He reportedly was paid $10 each for shooting them after they became too old to race. In 2010, a trainer abandoned 37 dogs after his local track’s season ended and 32 of them were later found dead from starvation. As recently as September, two Iowa trainers were banned after videos showed them training their dogs using live rabbits as lures.

The greyhound industry has taken meaningful steps to make sure that homes are found for retired dogs, but it has been a case of too little too late.

“The things we’re doing now with animal welfare we should have been doing 20 years ago, 30 years ago, for that matter,” said Jim Gartland, the executive director and secretary treasurer of the National Greyhound Association and the former general manager of Arapahoe Park, a Thoroughbred track in Colorado. “If we had done it then we might not be in the boat we are in now. We should have been weeding out the bad apples, including bad apples that operated the racetracks. That would have gone a long way toward helping our cause.”

Dog racing’s biggest adversary has been the organization Grey2K USA, which was founded in 2001 and whose mission is “to pass stronger greyhound protection laws and end the cruelty of dog racing” and says it has more than 250,000 supporters. It recorded its first success in 2008 when Massachusetts voters approved a ballot initiative to end greyhound racing in the state.

“In our case we had the Humane Society and Grey2K fighting us,” Gartland said. “It’s a lot easier to do that with a dog than a horse. They’ll say ‘look at this poor dog, would you do this to your pet?’ The way social media is, it was easy for them to spread misinformation. It’s so tough to fight that and you better have answers and ammunition at the ready at all times.”

After Massachusetts, one state after another started to fall. According to the Grey2K website, greyhound racing is illegal in 41 states and 40 tracks have shut down since the organization was formed.

It didn’t help that wagering on greyhound racing was declining rapidly. Its fan base was growing older and casinos proved to be stiff competition. Another factor was that many track owners were more focused on casinos and alternate forms of gambling than on dog racing, a problem that is familiar to everyone in horse racing. The prevailing wisdom was that some track operators hoped animal rights activists would succeed, which would allow them to continue with their poker rooms, simulcasting operations and, in some cases, slots, without having to hold dog races.

“The problem in Florida started when all the tracks wanted to become casinos,” said Jack Cary, a lobbyist for the greyhound industry. “They wanted to cut back on live racing and they didn’t take care of their core business. They didn’t promote racing and they didn’t change as everything around them changed.”

But ending greyhound racing in Florida looked like a hard battle to win. The greyhound industry was firmly entrenched there, seeped in history, and it was responsible for thousands of jobs. After the bill to end the sport was introduced, greyhound interests dug in for a fight.

“We never thought this would happen in Florida,” Gartland said. “Up until the night before the election, before the first votes came in, we were fairly confident that we had it won. All the polls said that we did. We thought we were safe because of the economic impact the sport had and the fact that we had the agriculture side on our side. We had the support of the fisherman, hunters, gun rights groups. The feeling was that if they were going to eliminate dog racing then they could come for hunters, for fishermen and all the rest. We were very confident this wouldn’t happen to us and it sure as heck did. We were stunned.”

The constitutional amendment–Amendment 13–passed by a 69-31 margin.

“You go from being angry over the misinformation and the lies and how they went about getting this done to the sadness of realizing that 1,500 of your closest friends are going to be out of a job,” Gartland said. “Some of these people have been doing this their whole lives and it is all they know. They forget about the people side of this.”

With the closing of the tracks, there will be hundreds of dogs that will need homes, but getting them placed is not expected to be a problem.

“I assure you that every dog will find a home,” said Sharon Dippel, who runs GST Sunstate Greyhound Adoption. “We haven’t had any problems with adopting these dogs. They are a fabulous breed and they acclimate very easily to home life. They are kind, affectionate, not aggressive and bond to their owners. There won’t be any problem getting them adopted out.”

As for Derby Lane, which opened in 1925 and was once frequented by Babe Ruth while he was taking part in spring training, the facility will remain open for poker and for simulcasting. The Palm Beach Kennel Club, the only other track in the state that is still running, will do the same. But for those who have the sport in their blood like Derby Lane’s Winning, it won’t be the same.

“It’s sad to see it go,” Winning said. “We’ve been racing here for 95 years. The greyhound is the only dog mentioned in the bible. Yes, business has been dropping off slowly. I worry that our sport and, for that matter, horse racing, is like the buggy whip industry. Technology has passed us by. We still have the simulcasting, so we will survive as a business. It’s just sad what has happened. Nobody wanted to go out this way.”

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