One of the biggest obstacles Sportsman’s Park and Hawthorne Race Course face in attempting to fill the void created by the departure of Arlington International Racecourse from the Chicago thoroughbred landscape is their locations.
Most trainers of high quality horses simply don’t want them spending the summer in the heavily industrialized Cicero/Stickney environment.
Ed Duffy, Sportsman’s chief operating officer, doesn’t think moving the tracks is the solution. He believes the answer is moving the barns.
“My idea is that we develop a training center 30-40 miles from (Sportsman’s and Hawthorne) with the possibility of stabling 3,000 horses,” Duffy said. “You’d have good year-around training facilities in a rural environment and good veterinary facilities.
“Horsemen wouldn’t have to worry about getting stalls whenever racing shifts to another track. It would stabilize the horsemen’s ability to find help and there would be steady year-around employment.
“If we set up a training center and made it a state-of-the-art facility there are ways we could encourage the state legislature to help. Maybe the University of Illinois vet school could have a research facility in conjunction with the center.”
Duffy is convinced that even if the $200 million Arlington is history, Chicago still has too many tracks. He continues to call for consolidation of Sportsman’s, owned by his employers, the Bidwill family, and Hawthorne, owned by the Carey family.
“I maintain it’s crazy to have two tracks next door to one another,” Duffy emphasized. “There are too many people dependent on racing today for racing to be able to afford it. There’s nothing in the law that says we have to support those people who have made very small investments.”
But Duffy realizes that racing thoroughbreds at the same location from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 isn’t conducive to raising the level of quality. Philadelphia Park runs this kind of thoroughbred marathon and, despite the fact that the track is located in one of America’s major market areas, racing there is only run of the mill.
“If we were to consolidate completely it would basically have us operating 12 months a year, switching from standardbred to thoroughbred and back,” he explained. “I also think Balmoral Park (in Crete) fits an important niche in racing. One thoroughbred track in Chicago won’t work. Without Arlington, a new door opens. Maybe there is an opportunity for Balmoral again.”
In Duffy’s opinion, the major impediment to relocating a consolidated Sportsman’s/Hawthorne is the land value in prime suburban locations. He also sees the $722 million makeover project at Midway Airport a few miles to the south as a major incentive to renovating rather than rebuilding from the ground up.
“This area will go through a renaissance,” Duffy predicted. “I think you will see it change dramatically. Major hotels are on the drawing board for the area around the airport. That’s why I’m not willing to say we ought to move the racetrack.
“If we had the training center in another location it would give us a lot of valuable land here. Rather than worrying about whether or not we can bring casino gaming here maybe we ought to think about other types of entertainment options–concerts and things that also would enable us to have other uses for these facilities on a 12-month basis.”
However, Duffy, who spent five years as Arlington’s president before going to work for the Bidwills in 1993, emphasized that the Bidwills and the Careys are unwilling to make a major commitment until there is definitive evidence that Dick Duchossois has no intention of reopening Arlington.
