Horsemen thankful for extra race days

LEXINGTON, KY — Whether they have 50 horses or five, the trainers planning to compete at the Corbin at Red Mile meet that begins Sunday agree: The addition of 12 standardbred dates in July makes a huge difference to them and to the entire Kentucky harness-racing circuit.

The Corbin meet, staged over The Red Mile’s famed red-clay oval, runs through July 27, with racing Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Post time is 1 p.m. EDT. The meet is being conducted as a bridge until the Corbin racetrack and its satellite Historical Horse Racing facility in nearby Williamsburg is constructed.

The venture is a partnership between a pair of stalwarts in thoroughbred racing: Keeneland Race Course and Kentucky Downs’ majority owners Ron Winchell and Marc Falcone. When the Corbin facility is operating, it will mark a return to harness-racing in Eastern Kentucky for the first time since 2017, when Thunder Ridge in Prestonsburg closed.

It will be the second new harness track to open in a short span, with Churchill Downs and Keeneland in 2019 launching Oak Grove in Christian County in southwestern, Ky.

“It’s very significant, because we’re looking to establish as close to a year-round circuit as we can get,” Jim Avritt Jr., president of the Kentucky Harness Horsemen’s Association, said of gaining a dozen days. “It’s a very important step, and we look forward to Corbin building a track and getting open. The money we generate from Historical Horse Racing will help further fund our sires stake program as well as our Kentucky fair program, the Kentucky-proud series. It’s important for the Kentucky horsemen to have places to race in Kentucky so we don’t have to go to Indiana or Ohio, or ship our horses up east to race in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and even Canada.”

Owner-trainer Anette Lorentzon keeps about 50 standardbred horses out of her Paris, Ky. base. She points out that it’s not just the extra race days that have a big impact, but also the opportunity to get trotters and pacers qualified to compete in purse races without having to haul them out of state to a track that’s open.

“The best place to be is Kentucky. It’s the horse capital,” said Lorentzon, who came to America from her native Sweden in 2003, expecting to stay for a year to get started in harness racing but never left. “I’m very, very thankful we’ve been able to have 12 more dates and I’m hoping it’s a bright future for Kentucky. It’s not just for the big guys. It’s important to have the small guys be able to make a living training horses. I think it’s going to be great.”

John “Man” Hughes brought four horses down from Chicago and expects to bring in five more. “This is my place, it’s like home,” Hughes said. “When I first started 10 years ago, I started coming up here. I love it. I wish we had 14 days. To gain days is a blessing.”

Trainer-driver Tyler Shehan said he’d also be racing in Chicago this month if not for the new meet. Shehan’s family has a farm with a five-eighths mile track in his home base of Hopkinsville. “But we can’t really use it to pay the bills,” Shehan said. “Without the days in Kentucky, it’s kind of hard to do it…. Chicago has been good to us, but we don’t like leaving home. We have a 4-year-old son now. We’d like to start school and settle down, and the ideal place is home in Kentucky. We’re really excited about the new track. This is a great opportunity for all the horsemen in Kentucky.”

“It’s going to work out very, very good for horsemen,” echoed Jackie Gray, who trains six horses out of Lebanon, Ky. “It has people wanting to race in Kentucky now. It used to be that nobody wanted to come. Everybody still wanted to come to The Red Mile, but that was our only option here in Kentucky.” Gray’s 12-year-old granddaughter Vanessa Knox, who helps her family around the barn, also weighed in on the new meet.

“Awesome. It is really important for us,” she said. “We’ve been through a lot this past winter, and just glad to be back.”

Randy Jerrell, a fourth generation horseman from Kevil (population 566), 17 miles from Paducah, called the Corbin at Red Mile meet “a great start.” “Mostly what I train are 2- and 3-year-olds and focus on the fair circuit, so it didn’t affect me terribly bad,” he said of the closures of Thunder Ridge, followed by Bluegrass Downs in Paducah in 2019.

“But a lot of these guys with older horses, raceway horses, have had to go somewhere else. I think you’ll start seeing people coming back.”

From Corbin at the Red Mile