By Jeff Lowe

Fonner Park and Will Rogers Downs were the surprise beneficiaries of national attention on the racing landscape in late March and throughout the month of April. They were the only racetrack signals available early in the week with a somewhat captive audience as so many sports-starved handicappers were stuck at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Off-track handle exploded to record totals at both racetracks, but the bottom line effects were different with the backdrop of empty grandstands.

Fonner Park in Grand Isle, Neb., has quietly built up an impressive on-track business model for its annual race meets, spanning from late February to Kentucky Derby weekend in early May. The meet has now been approved for 12 extra dates of spectator-free racing from May 4th through May 31 on a Monday-through-Wednesday schedule.

The grandstand sells out most every Saturday for 11 straight weeks, and the revenue from tickets, on-track handle, food and beverage are a large piece of the track's financial puzzle. The usual all-source handle for a Saturday at Fonner might not surpass $600,000, CEO Chris Kotulak said. Even though off-track handle skyrocketed to as much as a state record of $7.2 million for a mandatory Pick 5 payout and otherwise averaged about $2.5 million with the altered schedule, the track's off-track take at a rate between 3 and 4 percent is not enough to completely make up for the missing revenue from on-track patrons, he said.

"You see those sexy mutuel numbers and might think 'Wow, what a success!'" Kotulak said. "My response is 'Really, we're just surviving.' The horsemen, other than reducing the purse values for a couple stakes races, the purses have not changed one penny. For them, it's pretty much status quo. But people have asked me, 'Are we going to stick with this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday schedule to be more visible nationally,' and I don't even let them finish the sentence. Absolutely not. Fonner Park is not making any revenue on food, beverage or seating on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays now, and going forward we wouldn't make anything comparable to what we do on the weekends. We need that revenue to put that into our coffers to keep up on maintenance and repairs for our facility, and on top of that, it's the experience that is so important here.

"No one is going to get sold on horse racing by going to a racetrack on a Tuesday afternoon with a handful of people there. A lot of the nation doesn't realize we sell out every Saturday for 11 weeks of racing, our grandstand is jammed pack, and Sundays are big here too. That vibe is what brings people back.

We are very much alive and thriving on-track every racing weekend. We are a clean, tidy, efficient little racing facility, and if you haven't been to us before, you wouldn't have any reason to realize what we do well.

You'd think this is a dusty, five-eighths mile racetrack with a ratty old grandstand; and that is not us at all. We run a proper race meet, we keep up the facility, and we have more than 900 horses stabled here. So we are not just some carnival that comes to town; we've been operating since 1954 and it's a rich tradition here."

Kotulak realistically does not expect Fonner's signal to become more popular or pervasive after this unique circumstance that thrust the track into the limelight.

"We'll be yesterday's news once other racetracks come back online," he said. "I get it. I understand most people would rather bet on $200,000 stakes races with horses running on the turf, but with what we're offering, we're presenting full fields and competitive racing, so it makes sense that as the only show in town, we're benefiting with huge off-track handle totals compared to what we're used to; but I don't want to overstate what that means for our bottom line.

"One other piece of this equation is that there is never a race run at Fonner Park where the commission of the mutuel handle on that race pays for the purse of that race. We're offering $50,000 in purse money a day for our (original) 31-day race meet not for what they wager on a big Saturday or a big week or a season. It's the season plus the Triple Crown races, plus the Breeders' Cup and our big, mega handicapping challenge we offer in January each year that is either the third- or the second-best weekend we have annually. All that put together, we're able to scratch and claw together a condition book with roughly $5,000 a race in purse money."

Trainer David Anderson has been racing at Fonner for 40 years and said the surreal circumstances are never far from his thoughts in this meet.

"It's just a weird feeling every step of the way," Anderson said. "You're saddling horses with no people in the stands and with our masks on. There's no rah-rah and go-go, which is totally different for Fonner Park. It's always been a track with great crowds; the clubhouse sells out all the time. It's a big thing in Grand Island, Neb., and people come from all over the state. It's a real social gathering. Without all that, we're holding our own; but trust me, no one is liking this. There's the anxiety that if someone on the backside were to test positive for the virus, you got to think we'd be shut down right away. Then, there's no place to go. Every day we get to race; we've got to be thankful."

The big difference at Will Rogers Downs compared to Fonner is the presence of an onsite casino. Will Rogers—about 30 miles outside Tulsa, Okla.—is owned and operated by the Cherokee Nation. On-track attendance for racing is not that important in the overall revenue model, but Will Rogers was already positioning its schedule for more exposure by racing early in the week when there is less competition from bigger tracks. In March and April, Will Rogers only races on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. In May, Saturdays are added in.

Will Rogers Downs handled $16.8-million during an entire 25-day Thoroughbred meet in 2019. This year, that total was surpassed by the eighth day of racing.

"We have been the beneficiaries of this global pandemic that has shuttered racetracks—there is no question about it," said Jon Lies, who serves triple duty as the Will Rogers racing secretary, track announcer and oddsmaker. "Our racing product has really improved. Not only is field size up, but more importantly, the quality of the races has increased tremendously. The class levels of races that I'm able to offer have also increased; it results in much better cards, and the horseplayers have responded very positively. Purse levels have not changed and look to remain the same for the foreseeable future. The main catch right now is that the casino is closed, and the simulcast operations have also stopped at this point; and that's a lot of our purse money for the future. The additional handle that we're getting now is obviously much greater than before, so the percentage of that going back into purses has increased dramatically. So time will tell as far as what impact that will have for future race meets here."

A sign of the strange times is the availability—or lack thereof—of wagering for horsemen to bet on their own horses at Fonner and Will Rogers while much of the racing world is watching.

Fonner owners and trainers can bet online through an ADW. Owners can do so onsite at Fonner from the comfort of their vehicles. The track is allowing owners to drive up to the track apron and watch their horses run live, but without getting out of their cars.

In Oklahoma, in-state owners and trainers with horses running at Will Rogers do not have a way to bet on the races; there is no wagering on-track or simulcast operations during the pandemic, and ADW wagering through an online provider was already not an option in the state.

"It's a very unusual situation where this Oklahoma track is thriving as much as it is, but the horsemen that are here year after year can't bet on their own races," Lies said.

"Going forward, I think it's opened up a lot of doors for us. We've gone international and had eyeballs on us that we never would have imagined. Our goal is to try to retain this new audience that we have gained to what we feel like is a very attractive wagering product."

Will Rogers is the true home track for trainer Scott Young—he lives a few furlongs up the road and has led the trainer standings in recent years. This meet has been much more competitive, he said.

"It's definitely tougher racing, but we're just happy to be racing," said Young, who had a division this winter at Sam Houston Race Park, which cut short its meet due to COVID-19. "You have a lot of people shipping in since so many other tracks are closed, but I'm all for it. We're able to take advantage of it and put out a product that the gamblers are liking and seeing since we're pretty much the only game in town.

“It's nice to see full fields and the horses we enter are able to race, as opposed to races getting called off because of four or five entries. Before, we were life and death to draw enough horses for the ‘two other than’ allowances and upper-level claiming races, but now we're filling every race that's written, and horses are shipping in from Kentucky, New Mexico—you name it. You see horses shipping 12 or 13 hours to come run here at Will Rogers and it's kind of unbelievable."

North American Article Index

Against the odds - how two tracks kept racing and reaped handle rewards

By Jeff Lowe

Trainer Magazine