Recruiting runners - the lengths racing secretaries are going to to field runners for their races
/By Bill Heller
From New York to California, racing secretaries are working diligently to recruit horses, a task made significantly more difficult by the ongoing pandemic.
“Everybody is struggling to get horses,” New York Racing Association Senior Vice-President of Racing Operations Martin Panza said. “Everybody has empty stalls. Tracks that were running five days a week, now are running three or four.” Del Mar Racing Secretary David Jerkens put it this way: “It’s always a challenge. Any racing secretary in the country will tell you it’s hard to land new inventory.” Panza and Jerkens are veteran executives who have seen good times and bad.
Santa Anita’s Chris Merz began his first job as race secretary in February 2020. His timing couldn’t have been worse. “I think it was just before the pandemic,” Merz said. “You’re trying to come up with these ideas to get horses out here, and then you have the pandemic. Any plans get thrown out the window. Recruiting went out the window. You’re just trying to survive.” Thankfully, the New York Racing Association’s three tracks: Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga did survive, as did Santa Anita and Del Mar, which is the site of this year’s Breeders’ Cup. Yet the racing industry has shriveled considerably following the closing of Hollywood Park, the recent loss of Calder Raceway and, unless a miracle happens, Arlington Park.
“If tracks such as Arlington go away, if you lose a city like Chicago and take a big track out of the picture, it hurts the industry,” Panza said. “They’re not going to build new tracks to replace Calder, Hollywood, Arlington Park. It’s sad what you lose, but it’s a sign of the times. The industry is changing so quickly. What maybe worked 15 years ago might not work today.”
For smaller tracks, survival may depend on finding a niche. At Indiana Grand, Chris Polzin, who had been working at Arlington Park before moving to Indiana at the end of last October, was asked how his track competes with larger ones. “We race Monday through Thursday,” He said. “So we don’t really run against them. The big tracks gather all the attention. Who’s going to pay attention to us if we run on weekends?”
In mid-March, a month before Indiana Grand opened its 2021 Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse meeting, Polzin said, “Our stalls are jam packed. We have 900 stabled. I’ve got a list of 140 stalls people want and there are none.”
In mid-March, a month before Indiana Grand opened its 2021 Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse meeting, Polzin said, “Our stalls are jam packed. We have 900 stabled. I’ve got a list of 140 stalls people want and there are none.” Mike Anifantis, the racing secretary at Prairie Meadows in Iowa, hopes his Thoroughbred/Quarter Horse meet, which runs from April 30 to September 26, will be smoother than 2020. “This year, obviously, is a little bit easier than last year,” he said. “We didn’t know when we were opening. This year, we’ve got 15 to 18 new trainers coming in and eight or nine people who couldn’t come last year. We start out with Thoroughbreds, then mixed breeds; both run on the same card.”Asked if it’s a challenge to survive, Anifantis replied, “It’s a challenge for sure.”
Lone Star, which has both a Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse meeting, relies on its neighboring tracks. “We have a good circuit,” Lone Star Assistant Race Secretary Matt Crawford, a former trainer, said. “Sam Houston runs from January to April, then we start and run through July. Remington Park runs from August through December. We primarily get 75 to 80 percent of our horses from here. We get some horses from Oaklawn Park. We get some interest from Louisiana Downs, and it’s only a three-hour drive from Turf Paradise.” Asked about his hopes for this year’s meet, Crawford said, “We hope to be okay. It might be a little light the first couple of weeks. Around the first of May, we’ll start rolling pretty good.”…
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