Canterbury Park, Prairie Meadows open meets with horses on way from Oaklawn

Take I-35 due south 240 miles from Canterbury Park in Shakopee, Minn., and you will nearly run straight into Prairie Meadows in Altoona, Iowa. Both venues open their 2019 race meets Friday, but it’s a third track, another 620 miles south – Oaklawn Park – that is shaping their early seasons.

Canterbury and even more so Prairie stock their stable areas with horsemen who winter at Oaklawn Park, and instead of closing in mid-April this year, Oaklawn’s meet extends through Saturday.

Prairie Meadows opened last year on April 26, around its traditional beginning, but pushed back the racing season this year, knowing the Oaklawn shift would compromise early-meet entries.

Canterbury has many horses who wintered in Florida and Arizona but also will feel the effect of the extended Oaklawn season.

Andrew Offerman, director of racing at Canterbury, said there were about 700 horses in the stables Wednesday and 250-300 at Oaklawn headed Canterbury’s way.

Prairie Meadows gets “maybe 50 percent of our horses from Oaklawn,” according to Mike Anifantis, who was named Prairie Meadows’s racing secretary after Pat Pope last year accepted a summer job at the New York Racing Association.

“It’s going to be slower than usual,” Anifantis said. “We’ll start off with two days [per week], then three, then get to our regular pattern of four.”

Because of the later start, the 67-day Thoroughbred portion of the Prairie season now bleeds over into the Quarter Horse meeting during August and September. Prairie’s standard racing week includes Thursday and Friday evenings and Saturday and Sunday afternoons, but in late August and early September, Thoroughbreds race Monday and Tuesday. Prairie will lean heavily on Iowa-bred races early this season and has little room for major disruption, having averaged just 6.87 starters per race during the 2018 meet. The track might also feel the absence of trainer Robertino Diodoro, who took no stalls in Iowa this season.

Prairie has the more extensive stakes schedule, headed by the Grade 3, $300,000 Prairie Meadows Cornhusker on July 5, and larger overnight purses, $240,000 to $200,000. But Canterbury gets larger fields and has a turf course, which Prairie lacks.

The turf, flattened with an oversized roller for the first time in three years following the 2018 season, took a lot of snow this winter, and after a cool, wet spring could be slow to come around. The dirt track, according to Offerman, underwent major maintenance during the offseason. The cushion was pulled off the limestone base, which was regraded for the first time in close to 30 years. The cushion, which had clay added two years ago, was reblended with some additional sand, Offerman said, before being laid back down on the rehabbed base.

“I think it’s a little tough to tell as far as times, but the goal is to create a surface that might be a little more forgiving and is more consistent in wet weather,” Offerman said.

New track superintendent Johnny Jamison is charged with maintaining the Canterbury surface through the 66-day mixed Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse meet.

Weekday cards start at 6 p.m. Central, weekends at 12:45. There are just 11 cards during May, after which Canterbury switches to a standard Thursday-through-Sunday racing week. Mac Robertson and Diodoro slugged it out atop the trainer standings during 2018 and figure to do so again. The jockey colony should look like last year’s.

“This is the 25th anniversary of Canterbury under this management group,” Offerman said. “We’re pretty proud because a lot of people didn’t give it much chance of being around more than a couple years.”