At long last, Colonial Downs reopens with a 15-day meet

Talk about a long layoff.

Colonial Downs last hosted a meeting in 2014 and returns to action Thursday with a 15-day racing season.

Despite the extended break, Colonial officials feel the venue has been working like a race-fit organization and will come back from an undesired vacation a better, stronger entity.

“Did you look at the overnight?” Jill Byrne, vice president of racing operations, asked a caller.

Yes, and it was extensive. A total of 107 horses were entered on a 10-race card – and no wonder. Total purses for a program with nothing higher-class than a second-level allowance race are a robust $515,000. Colonial has committed to offering at least $500,000 in purses every race card.

The purse money for this year’s meet, derived from handle at four off-track-betting locations and account-wagering services, has been trickling into the horsemen’s account for six years now. It won’t be until 2021 that purses get boosted from the historical racing machines housed on track and at two off-site parlors.

The passage of legislation permitting those slot machine-like games is what spurred Colonial’s reopening, leading Chicago-based Revolutionary Racing, Los Angeles-based Peninsula Pacific, and Iowa-based JNB Gaming to purchase Colonial, a transaction reportedly worth more than $20 million that closed in April 2018. Colonial’s historic racing machines are Virginia’s only legal form of gambling besides the state lottery and horse racing, and the ontrack machines that opened this past April reportedly have done robust business.

Even without a purse infusion from the machines, Colonial is set to expand its racing season in 2020, though the track, which sits in a rural area about 26 miles east of Richmond, won’t run more than 30 days next year, Byrne said.

It was dates versus dollars that finally put an end to Colonial in 2014, with the previous owner, Jacobs Entertainment, unable to agree with the Virginia Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association on terms for a race meeting. The HBPA insisted on a longer meeting while Jacobs was focused on a short season with larger purses, and in 2014, with no path to resolution, Jacobs turned over the Colonial license to the Virginia Racing Commission.

That, for the time, ended a process that had begun when Virginia voters in 1988 passed a referendum permitting a racetrack to be built in the state. Contention ran deep from the start regarding who would operate the track and where it would be located, and Colonial finally opened in 1997. The track once had a $1 million race, the Virginia Derby, before nagging problems began cutting into the operational core.

Now, Byrne describes Colonial’s relationship with the HBPA as “excellent.”

“That entire group has been very supportive of getting racing back here,” she said.

Colonial has timed its meet this year in part to coincide with the Maryland circuit’s move to Timonium, the quietest part of the Maryland season, and an August hiatus at Parx Racing. Byrne said 425 stalls have been allotted on a backstretch that can accommodate about 900 horses and is expected to house a greater equine population in 2020.

“We’ve got a real mix of people from Tampa, Louisiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Maryland – all over the place,” Byrne said. “A lot of people took six or eight stalls for rotating horses in and out.”

Colonial’s broad expanse of a turf course long has been one of its primary selling points, and the course, 1 1/8 miles in circumference on the outer rail, one mile on the inner rail, remains the same as it was before the track closed. The dirt track, at 1 1/4 miles the second largest in the U.S., was entirely refurbished earlier this season for the reopening. Byrne described the surface as similar to the dirt track at Laurel Park in Maryland.

Colonial on Monday announced the meet would be run under “a comprehensive set of elevated safety and horse welfare protocols” such as screening of stall applicants, a review of entered horses, and raceday inspections.

Stakes races are carded every Saturday of the meet, highlighted by the Grade 3, $300,000 Virginia Derby set for Aug. 31.