Fair Grounds business close to steady at 2024-2025 meet

After rebounding last season from a disastrous 2022-23 race meet when the turf course was unusable much of the winter, Fair Grounds business held fairly even, with some declines, during the 2024-25 meeting that ended Sunday.

Total handle on the 76-day meet that comprised 682 races and 5,514 betting interests was $248,683,784. Total handle on last season’s 75-day meet that comprised 697 races and 5,986 betting interests was $254,517,850.

Thus, total handle fell 2.2 percent, handle per race held nearly even, and handle per betting interest rose 4.2 percent.

Last season’s daily handle, $3,393,571 , fell 3.6 percent to $3,272,155.

Handle during the 2022-23 meet dropped some 20 percent across the board in great part because that meet included only 58 turf races, 77 fewer than during the 2021-22 season. Fair Grounds ran 172 turf races during 2023-24 and got in 169 this meet.

Turf races draw larger fields than dirt, attracting 9.4 starters per race at the meet compared to an overall figure of 8.08 starters per race. The overall number declined from 8.46 starters per race in 2023-24.

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Favorites ran wild all meet, hitting at a 42 percent clip overall and 45 percent on dirt, a higher percentage than any in recent Fair Grounds history. The overall number was up from 37 percent in 2023-24.

Jose Ortiz hung his tack at Fair Grounds for the first time and ran away with the riding title. His 98 winners were the most since Florent Geroux posted the same total during the 2016-17 meet.

Joe Sharp pulled away late in the meet from Brad Cox and won his first Fair Grounds training crown, sending out 40 winners.

Godolphin with 11 wins won the owners’s title.

While Tiztastic won the Louisiana Derby, the meet’s richest race, and Good Cheer the Fair Grounds Oaks, Touchuponastar stole the show on the season’s biggest day, the March 22 card. Owned by former New Orleans Saints quarterback Jake Delhomme, Touchuponastar, a Louisiana-bred, had finished second in the 2024 renewal of the New Orleans Classic, and this season led from start to finish under Tim Thornton, beating, among others, champion 3-year-old Sierra Leone.

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