Hawthorne Racecourse

Though Hawthorne maintenance crews took the first step Monday toward converting the racing surface so that it is suitable for Thoroughbred racing, Illinois horsemen remain skeptical that racing will proceed when the Thoroughbred meet is scheduled to open Mar. 29. Hawthorne officials had testified at a meeting of the Illinois Racing Board that work would begin Monday to change over the racetrack from a Standardbred surface to one that is conducive to Thoroughbred racing. But Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association (ITHA) Executive Director Dave McCaffrey noted that the only work that...

They've been racing at Fairmount Park, which opened its doors for business on Sept. 26, 1925, now for 100 years. For most of those years, the odds have been stacked against the little track in Collinsville, Illinois. Tracks without revenue from casinos and with a poor racing product usually don't last that long. But for all those years, Fairmount kept grinding away. For horsemen and track owners, it was a battle to survive. But survive they did and now Fairmount has a new lease on life and there are reasons...

A casino is supposed to be on the way, but in the meantime these are tough times for racing in Chicago and its only remaining racetrack, Hawthorne. They still don't have any outside revenue from a casino, their purses are meager and their simulcast signal gets lost on days like Saturday, when they went up against the likes of Aqueduct, Gulfstream, Keeneland, Oaklawn and Santa Anita. The handle Saturday was $1,019,178. It should have been three times that. We've seen a lot of tracks experiment with lower takeouts. The latest...

With undefeated phenom Flightline (Tapit) and sophomore star Epicenter (Not This Time) headlining a respectably deep GI Breeders' Cup Classic, one oft-repeated quip is that 2022 is turning out to be "a tough year to have a good horse" aiming for a divisional championship. Yet a few rungs farther down the class ladder--more than a few, in truth--a blue-collar starter-allowance stalwart is tweaking that phrase so it better suits his grind-it-out style, proving that '22 is actually "a good year to have a tough horse." Last week at Churchill Downs,...

Citing distrust in Churchill Downs, Inc. (CDI), the gaming corporation that owns Arlington International Racecourse, the leadership of the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association (ITHA) on Sept. 16 asked the Illinois Racing Board (IRB) to impose a condition on 2021 race dates that would withhold millions of dollars in purse fund "recapture" money from the track if it did not end up racing its applied-for 68 days next year. The IRB, which was meeting with three newly appointed commissioners for the first time on Wednesday, probed Arlington president Tony Petrillo about...

The long-overdue contract between Arlington International Race Course and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association (ITHA) was inked just minutes before a 9 a.m. Monday Illinois Racing Board (IRB) meeting, enabling racing commissioners to finally approve a 30-date summer season at the suburban Chicago track that will run July 23 through Sep. 26. Racing will be conducted Thursdays through Saturdays, with no open stakes races in 2020, including the track's signature event, the GI Arlington Million. TDN requested purse level specifics from ITHA representatives, but received no response prior to deadline...