When people show up at the track to watch and wager on the racing they likely don’t spend any time wondering how the surface of the track remains in good shape regardless of the weather. In all cases that is due to the track superintendent, who is in charge of making sure the horses and drivers have a safe environment to do their work. At Yonkers Raceway that job belongs to Ed Angell, a former military man who got into the business about 10 years ago and has turned around a track that was known for constant cancelations into one that has recently weathered multiple snow events and days of freezing-cold temperatures. The 57-year-old was kind enough to take some time out of his hectic schedule on a week filled with rain, snow and sleet to talk about his journey and track maintenance in general. I think you’ll appreciate his work ethic and the knowledge he provides on his craft. Enjoy! How did you get started in track maintenance? I worked at Plainridge Racetrack in Plainville, Massachusetts. I started out driving the starting gate. One day a friend said to me ‘I heard you were in the military’ and I told him I used to work in submarines. He asked if I used to drive the submarines and I said, ‘yes, we just went straight’ [lauging]. He said that was exactly what we need, someone that can drive the car straight. I started in 2015 under Steve O’Toole. Over the years I started staying around and helped out with the track after I was done and as time went on some people who were elderly started leaving and I moved up the chain really quickly, like in a couple of years. Steve O’Toole then asked me if I wanted to be the track manager. I had been doing it for two years and had learned from Steve’s 50 years of experience. He was between a rock and a hard place because people left and I ran the track for the next three years. The whole thing was simply by coincidence. A friend asked me if I could drive the gate car and the rest is history. What type of education goes into a profession like that? Is it all on the job training? I was green to it. I caught on really quick and just kinda understood what it took to keep a horse safe and keep the track going. I had a lot of mentors. My saying has always been that if you are going to give me 50 years of your knowledge for free, I’m going to take it. Over the years that is what has gotten me to where I am now. I’ve only been doing this for 10 years, being a trackman, but I’ve leaned on a lot of shoulders and different people. With a track like Yonkers that races five nights a week, does it require more maintenance than one that races just twice a week? This is the hardest racetrack in the world. We’d be out there seven days a week if we could. We only work six days a week because management doesn’t want us here on Sundays unless there are special circumstances like this past weekend. It was my wife’s birthday, Super Bowl Sunday and we didn’t leave the track all weekend. We started eight o’clock Saturday night. This track has a 14 degree banking. It is very hard to hold material on the track. When I got here they told me about all the cancelations they were having and I made it a point to find every quarry I could in New York to ask for material that would bind up and stick together. I went back to Plainridge to take two samples and asked the places if they had something similar. Plainridge is a lot flatter than Yonkers but I happened to find a couple of products that worked. I’m a perfectionist I won’t leave the track until it is perfect. I’m here 12 to 14 hours a day from eight or nine in the morning until probably the tenth race every day. I do it for the horses because without them we don’t have a job. You touched on the track at Yonkers having a bad reputation for many years but I’ve heard much more praise lately. What other changes have you made since starting two years ago? We got a new trackman named Dillon Auth. I’m not saying that the rest of the track crew isn’t amazing but this young kid has done a great job. Over here I can’t touch the equipment because it is all union based. This kid has been my superstar. He’s just like me, a perfectionist. At five of four last night he wouldn’t get off the track. I actually had to tell him to get off. I told him, ‘it’s good for tonight’ because we were there all day on Sunday. Other than me coming in with different ideas, I believe he is the reason this track turned around. To have the track right you have to be out there all day. Another person I’d like to mention is Gary Wolff. He is the one that told me I should take the job at Yonkers. At the time I lived five minutes away from the track at Plainridge and I was like ‘what are you talking about?’ He inspected my track many times at Plainridge and was filling in as a consultant at Yonkers. He told Alex Dadoyan that he had someone that could get the track back racing every night. Alex gave me a call, I showed up that next Monday and I never left. That was October of 2022. So you can’t operate any of the equipment? I can’t touch anything. I can’t even pick up a pylon. So that’s the toughest part of my job because the track superintendent wants to touch it, feel it, smell it; that’s what we do. I have to dictate what I want done to someone else and that is very hard to do. Most people can’t catch on to that, which is why I credit Dillon. This kid said ‘you have the knowledge and I know how to operate the machinery. You tell me what to do.’ So far I think we’ve only had one cancelation due to Mother Nature. I really couldn’t do this job without the crew. I have the wand but they make it happen. Recently you’ve been dealing with a lot of bad weather – snow, rain, sleet. Has it been difficult to keep the track in top shape? Yes, very difficult. We go through a lot of material and a lot of man hours. To get the track ready after snow it is imperative that you get it off the track as soon as you can. I believe in letting the snow fall and taking it off all in one shot. Other people believe in chasing the storm [clearing it as it falls]. I have four or five operators that work with me and they know how to operate every piece of equipment. Without them we would not be able to run the track. Are the hours much longer in the winter than the summer? Yes. The first week we were here, we opened on January 20, that week the temperatures didn’t get above 20 degrees all week. The track was frozen solid. I got here Saturday at four in the afternoon and we stayed on the track until seven o’clock Monday night. We had over 48 hours of overtime that weekend to make sure we didn’t fail on opening night. If you let a track freeze you’ll never get it back. You have to freeze dry the track, unfreeze dry the track. It takes several hours. Do you have any other connections to the sport outside of your job? Family? The reason why I even got into it was because I love the horses. I used to go to Narraganset Racetrack with my father. I still have memories when I was 11 years old of watching the horses run with him. My two brothers were involved. They used to work at Narraganset Racetrack. Secretariat ran there. My brother Jack was a bug rider and my brother Jeff was a groom. They both lived at the track in a tack room and I remember going to visit them with my dad. For many years we would go to Rockingham, Foxboro and all over. Have you ever owned a horse? No because I’ve always worked for organizations where if you are the trackman you can’t own a horse. Sometimes it seems like a superintendent can make the track more speed favoring or tiring at will. Is it really that easy? Yes. You can tighten up a track as fast as you can loosen up a track, but I put the same track out there every day. Sometimes people will come up to me and tell me that their horses have bad feet and ask me to soften that track. I tell them that I can’t adjust the track for your horse because that is fixing horse races and I’ll lose my job. I try to keep the same track every day with an inch of cushion out there. But back to your question, all it takes is a shot of water and two screens and it can be like concrete. We are working with stone dust and it is a form of concrete. If you opened up a bag of Quikrete it is almost exactly what we are using on the track. When you add water it hardens up. You say that you try to keep the track the same all the time but what about on a big card or for a race like the MGM Yonkers International Trot? I never try to fix the track unless there is a reason brought about by Mother Nature. I watch the weather two or three days out. You cannot be a trackman without watching the weather. I don’t leave this track if there is bad weather. I sleep here in a chair, sometimes overnight. They think I’m crazy but I have a love for the game. I believe you have to be here for the track to be correct. [DRF HARNESS: Sign up for our FREE DRF Harness Digest Newsletter] I saw you are newly married in the last few years. If you are sleeping at the track, how does your wife take it? My wife [Kimberly] says, ‘Ed, it has always been your dream to be a track superintendent and now you have that job at one of the biggest tracks in the world. You do what you do.’ She stands by me every minute. Without her there would be no me. She sends food up for the guys every week. I go home on the weekends. I have an apartment in Riverdale that I stay in Monday through Friday and I go home to Providence, Rhode Island on the weekends, weather permitting. What is your favorite thing to do outside of work? I’m a high school referee. I referee baseball, basketball and football. I’ll usually referee two or three games on Saturday and again on Sunday. I try to keep busy.