Arlington Park and its company owner Churchill Downs Inc. have not applied for live horse racing in 2022 until a Friday deadline, shedding distant hopes of owners, coaches and fans that the iconic circuit could return for one final lap power.
Even though the Louisville-based horse racing and gambling company had an application in hand, officials decided not to file anything with the Illinois Racing Board before a 4 p.m. deadline and kept their promise to open the local oval after the final race in that one Season to close September 25th.
Churchill CEO Bill Carstanjen said during a quarterly conference call Thursday that the company was still in the process of selecting a winning offer after receiving “numerous” offers to buy the 326 acres of prime Arlington Heights real estate. Among the bidders are the Chicago Bears and a group hoping for thoroughbred horse races.
But Churchill’s decision on Friday not to compete for the 2022 race dates jeopardizes the company’s claims to continue operating its system of eight betting shops off-track – in Aurora, Chicago, Green Oaks, Hodgkins, Hoffman Estates, McHenry, Rockford and more Villa Park – as well as its trackside facility on Euclid and Wilke streets.
The company could also lose its right to continue making prepayments across the state through its online Twin Spiers platform.
In the first six months of the year, Twin Spiers had 32% of the market share of these online betting for a total of $ 59 million. It was second only to TVG at 40%, or $ 73 million, according to the racing committee statistics.
The Friday deadline that came and went also failed to clarify Carstanjen’s previous proposals that Churchill might attempt to move Arlington’s racing license to another community in the Chicago area or elsewhere in the state.
When the Arlington property sale was announced in February, he said the company was “committed to the Illinois thoroughbred racing industry and will consider all options to work towards future opportunities.”
Amid Arlington’s anticipated exit from the market, the already precarious future of the horse racing industry in Illinois became less clear on Friday afternoon as the Hawthorne Race Course in Cicero remained the only track in the Chicago area that hosts both thoroughbred and standard horse races could become.
Hawthorne made two generic motions asking for both whole blood and harness meetings to be held over 365 days. It is possible that the route will be run on Thoroughbreds instead of Arlington in the summer, while harnessing them for the rest of the year.
However, a state official confirmed that the route cannot operate concurrently during the year and regulators expect more details to be provided during their upcoming review process. The Race Committee will hold its annual hearing and vote on a final timetable for 2022 on September 23.
Hawthorne public relations director Jim Miller said the track plans to speak to the two rider groups, representing both thoroughbred and harness owners and coaches, to set a proposed 2022 timetable ahead of the September race committee meeting.
“We have a full calendar year to work with them,” Miller said. “We haven’t made sure of exactly when the meetings will start or end, or what part of the year they will be.”
While Arlington and Hawthorne have regularly flipped their thoroughbred racing schedules – with Arlington hosting the horses in the summer and Hawthorne in the spring and fall – the state’s Fairmount Park has long been operated separately from that arrangement. Fairmount in Collinsville near St. Louis applied for 150 days of racing from March 12th to November 20th.
