Horses set to race at State Fair Park

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By BRIAN ROSENTHAL / Lincoln Journal Star

Through nearly 40 years of horse training, Dan Coughlin always feels excitement when the Nebraska circuit hits Lincoln.

State Fair Park, Coughlin says, is his favorite meet. He likes the town. He likes the people.

He really likes the track.

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Richard Jones of Fort Pierre, S.D., bathes Silent Fawn at State Fair Park on Thursday morning. (William Lauer)

Richard Jones of Fort Pierre, S.D., bathes Silent Fawn at State Fair Park on Thursday morning. (William Lauer)

“We seem to do pretty good here,” said Coughlin, a Sioux City, Iowa, native. “This will be my best three months of the year.”

Lincoln’s 37-day live racing meet, which begins tonight and runs through July 13, will elicit more than an adrenaline rush, though, for horse racing enthusiasts.

It will also bring questions. Namely, what’s the future for live horse racing in Lincoln?

The Nebraska State Fair is moving to Grand Island, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will eventually turn the current fairgrounds into Innovation Park. The racetrack and grandstands that fans see today will one day be a recreational space and scenic pond. Eventually, the fair’s partnership with racing in Lincoln will end.

“We’ll figure something out,” Coughlin said. “What that is, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does.”

Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman has told the Nebraska Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association it can continue live racing at State Fair Park through 2012, and perhaps longer.

David Anderson, a board member of the Nebraska HBPA, said the long-term success of a new track, wherever built, would be contingent on adding expanded gambling, currently not allowed in Nebraska.

“If we would get slot machines at racing enclosures only, our industry would be back thriving,” Anderson said. “I think it would have a huge chance of passing, if we could just get it on the ballot.”

Anderson dreams of a mile-long track, somewhere along Interstate 80, with expanded gambling and live racing from April to September. Another plan, and perhaps more realistic one, is building a track and simulcast facility at 84th Street and Havelock Avenue, the site of the Lancaster Event Center.

Coughlin, like Anderson, said allowing expanded gambling could breathe life into Nebraska’s thoroughbred industry, in a downward spiral since the closure of Omaha’s Ak-Sar-Ben in 1995. He said many trainers who used to race in Nebraska now race in Iowa, which has slot machines at tracks.

Expanded gambling in Nebraska would mean bigger purses at each of the state’s five horse tracks.

“Then, I think horse racing can flourish again,” Coughlin said. “I really do.”

Uncertainty about the future hasn’t appeared to affect Lincoln’s upcoming meet. Nearly 1,000 horses have filled the backstretch barns, and 69 horses are part of tonight’s nine-race card. The jockey colony, trainers say, is larger and stronger than in recent years.

Fan support doesn’t appear to be waning, either.

State Fair Park racing manager Mike Newlin said an estimated 3,500 fans attended last Saturday’s simulcast of the Kentucky Derby, including 1,000 on the newly renovated Level 2. Reservations for the clubhouse were sold-out a week in advance, and total handle on Derby Day was $332,000.

Still, Newlin, in his first year at State Fair Park, understands skepticism about the future. He comes to Lincoln from Canterbury Park in Minnesota, where he was director of mutuels, but he’s an Omaha native.

“If what happens to Ak-Sar-Ben happens to this place,” Newlin said, “I don’t know how long we can make it as a thoroughbred industry here in Nebraska.”

Newlin acknowledged the effects expanded gambling would have on horse racing in Nebraska. The long-term successes of tracks around the country, especially the smaller circuits, have been dependent on what Newlin termed “racinos.”

“We’ll have a few years here to figure out a plan to make Nebraska racing viable in the long term,” Newlin said, “and not just patching it through year by year and hoping that we can keep it going.”

Reach Brian Rosenthal at 473-7436 or brosenthal@journalstar.com.