Colonial Downs to race 27 days in 2022
Colonial Downs in New Kent, Va., will race 27 days in 2022 on a Monday-through-Wednesday schedule beginning July 11, the track announced Wednesday.
Live racing will start each day at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, running through Sept. 7, two days after Labor Day. The schedule will give Colonial a daytime slot in the late-summer simulcast market on days in which many tracks don’t host live racing.
Purses at the track will average $600,000 a day, Colonial said in a press release. The track’s purses are heavily subsidized by casino operations owned and operated by the track’s parent company.
Colonial ran 21 live racing dates in 2021, with an average of $2.24 million a day in handle and $522,000 in purses. The majority of the races at Colonial are run on its turf course, and average field size at the track was 8.36 in 2021, a figure that is approximately one horse higher than the average field size nationwide in 2021.
The track said that its stakes schedule will be released “in the coming weeks.”