Fairmount Park opens meet with reasons to worry about future

Fairmount Park opens a 52-day meeting Tuesday, and while the number of race days has dropped from the 68 cards run last year, there could be far graver changes on the horizon at Fairmount after this season.

This is the third and last year that impact fees garnished from the gross profits at the highest-earning Illinois casinos will be added to purse money generated through betting handle, and the St. Louis-area track faces difficult decisions if a new revenue stream supplying the purse account isn’t opened soon.

Fairmount still has a core group of local horsemen, but the track’s regional status suffered when Indiana began offering slots-enhanced purses in 2008. Fairmount paid an average of $58,274 in daily purses last year and figures to distribute a similar amount this year. Average daily all-sources handle last meet was roughly $380,000, which actually was about $60,000 more per day than in 2000, when Fairmount, in a different era, hosted a whopping 147 cards.

Average field size during the 2013 meet was 7.31 starters per race, most of them of the lower-end variety. The 2014 Fairmount stakes schedule consists of two $100,000 Illinois-bred races Sept. 9. There are two race cards per week – Tuesday afternoons and Saturday nights – during April, most of May, and from mid-August until meet’s end Sept. 20, with a third card – Friday nights – added from late May through mid-August.

The featured sixth race Tuesday is a first-level Illinois-bred sprint allowance with a purse of $13,000 that drew eight entrants, including the coupled entry of Shame on the Night and Prissy Ruler.

The connections of 5-2 morning-line favorite Foxie’s Beauty will be familiar to any horseplayer with the most cursory knowledge of the track: Owner William Stiritz (who also owns Fairmount), trainer Scott Becker, and jockey Rafael Hernandez all had a dominant Fairmount meet in 2013. Becker and Stiritz won 62 races, while Hernandez – fresh off a strong runner-up winter-spring meet at Hawthorne this year – won 136 races last year, 70 more than second-leading rider Uriel Lopez.