Belmont to experiment with twilight Thursday cards

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – The New York Racing Association will experiment by conducting twilight racing on Thursdays instead of Fridays at the Belmont Park spring/summer meet that begins April 26.

First post for eight of the 10 Thursdays when racing is conducted will be 3:05 p.m. The exceptions will be May 2 and July 4, the first and last Thursdays of the meet, respectively. Post time for those Thursdays and the other days of the meet is tentatively set for 1:30 p.m.

David O’Rourke, NYRA’s newly appointed president and CEO, said he wanted to accumulate data on how a later post on Thursdays would impact handle.

O’Rourke said a later post on Thursdays sort of aligns Belmont with Churchill Downs, which begins its Thursday cards at 5 p.m.

“Churchill created a market and we’ll be able to get data for Thursdays,” O’Rourke said. “We have it on Fridays.”

According to NYRA, total handle on the twilight Friday cards it has run from 2015-18 is up 14.5 percent over non-twilight Friday cards. Handle in New York on Belmont’s twilight Fridays is up 20 percent, while handle on Belmont’s races from California on twilight Fridays is up 37 percent.

Handle on Belmont’s races on twilight Fridays from Florida, Kentucky, and Maryland is down 7 percent.

Post time for most cards at Belmont is scheduled for 1:30 p.m., though O’Rourke said that could be revisited.

Post times for weekday racing at Belmont could further change depending on when construction is allowed to start on the new hockey arena to be built on the grounds of the track. The Empire State Development Corp. is expected to complete an environmental impact study on the project sometime during the second quarter of this year.

Based on the number of comments ESD has received from the community surrounding Belmont, it is likely that study would not be finalized until late in the second quarter, which means construction would likely begin after Belmont’s summer meets ends on July 7 and racing begins at Saratoga.