Hawthorne opens 35-day fall-winter meet

It’s been a while, and it’s not the same, but Hawthorne Racecourse commences a 35-day fall-winter Thoroughbred meet Friday.

Hawthorne hasn’t hosted a Thoroughbred race since January, at the end of its 2019 fall-winter season. Hawthorne skipped its winter-spring meet this year to focus on construction of a casino, which the track expects to provide a desperately needed revenue stream into the Hawthorne purse account beginning late in 2021.

“This is a bare bones kind of meet right now,” racing secretary Allen Plever said.

Plever’s racing office has been moved from one end of the Hawthorne grandstand to a cramped space on the opposite end as the family-owned racecourse remakes its aging facility to accommodate a casino and sports book. The Illinois Gaming Board has given Hawthorne initial licensing approval for the casino, though the final stage of the licensing process hasn’t been completed.

For now, Hawthorne has only a pair of Illinois-bred futurities on its stakes schedule and will be paying roughly $110,000 per day in purses – bare bones, indeed. Purse outlays would be lower had the track owners not agreed to defer taking recapture this year. Recapture is the arcane 1995 Illinois law meant to compensate track operators, through deductions from the purse account, for the migration of local handle on the live Illinois product to out-of-state racetracks. The Hawthorne purse account is considerably overpaid entering this meet, but the local horsemen’s group, the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, and Hawthorne figure they can reconcile the purse account once casino revenue starts flowing.

For now, the challenge is conducting a race meet in the middle of a construction project. Because of COVID-19, Hawthorne will permit only 250 spectators on race days, so crowds won’t pose a problem. The track is closed Monday for training and open from 5 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. the other weekdays. Weekend training sessions run from 5-10:30.

Plever expects a peak of about 1,500 horses on the grounds, which should be plenty to support a meet that runs three days per week – Friday through Sunday – during October and November before dropping Fridays for two-day weeks during December. Opening-day entries were very strong, with 87 horses, including also-eligibles, in eight races.

There are new outfits on the grounds, including several from Canterbury Park, but most notable is the first Chicago string for the sprawling operation of Karl Broberg. Broberg, who entered in four races Friday, has 60 stalls at Hawthorne and as an aggressive claiming outfit figures to shake things up this fall. Broberg is bringing in jockey Elvin Gonzalez to ride first call at the meet. Francisco Arrieta, who won 71 races at Canterbury, will hang his tack at Hawthorne, as will Alex Canchari. Arlington’s runaway leading rider Jareth Loveberry is part of the colony, but his business will change radically since his chief patron, trainer Larry Rivelli, runs far less at Hawthorne than at Arlington.

Hawthorne runs turf races as far into the autumn as weather allows, and the dirt track, with one of the longest homestretches in the country, provides for a fair and appealing race flow. A year from now, the struggling track hopes new casino money will be close to flowing into the racing product.