On Tuesday–just two weeks after two horses died on Laurel Park's dirt surface and not even 24 hours after Laurel announced its track superintendent would be retiring immediately–the head of the new non-profit organization that will run both Laurel and Pimlico Race Course starting in 2025 told the Maryland Racing Commission that an immediate search is underway for an expert to quell the main-track woes that have intermittently plagued Laurel the past two decades.
“We will obviously do a search nationwide for a winter-weather superintendent. It's a very important position. It's a high priority for us. We will take our time and try to find the right person that fits our racetrack moving forward,” said Bill Knauf, the president and general manager of The Maryland Jockey Club Inc., the new 501(c) (4) organization that has been granted state authority to manage and operate Thoroughbred horse racing at Laurel and Pimlico.
Although Maryland racing is in the midst of a private-to-public management flux that will see the state take ownership of Pimlico and rebuild it (with the three-year goal of eventually ceasing racing at Laurel and consolidating all Maryland racing at the new “Pimlico Plus”), the decades-long pattern of main-track safety difficulties at Laurel hasn't changed much, and those issues have once again percolated to crisis level.
After years of freeze/thaw and drainage troubles, Laurel's main track was closed for five months in 2021 for an emergency rebuild from the base up. But eight horses died from fractures while racing or training over that new track within weeks of its opening as the weather turned colder, leading to weeks-long halts in racing through winter of 2021-22.
The fatality spike quieted for more than a year, then in April 2023, five more main-track equine fatalities at Laurel caused the closure of the track for another week.
1/ST Racing (The Stronach Group), which is the current (but outgoing) owner of Laurel and Pimlico, hired veteran racing surface maintenance manager Ken Brown to oversee those tracks in September 2023.
Things went generally well early on during Brown's watch–he was a former decades-long member of the Maryland track surfaces team, but had moved on to be the superintendent at Delaware Park and Colonial Downs before being lured back to Laurel and Pimlico.
But this fall, after weeks without significant rain followed by downpours, problems began to crop up. Since Nov. 17 there have been two reported equine fatalities at Laurel.
One was Calle de Oro (Hard Spun), a 2-year-old colt trained by Jose Corrales who was favored in a $20,000 claimer when he suffered a catastrophic injury near the three-eighths pole and had to be euthanized on the track.
Another was Overwish (Curlin), a 3-year-old filly with a 2-for-3 record from trainer Brittany Russell's stable who sustained an open fracture to her right front cannon bone while galloping out at the mile pole after a four-furlong workout, requiring euthanization.
Trainer Gary Capuano also reported during the Dec. 3 commission meeting that during the same time frame, one of his trainees stumbled during a morning workout, unseating the exercise rider, who fractured a cheekbone.
After the two fatalities, jockeys and track management had clashing ideas about the track's safety and its maintenance procedures, leading to the cancellation of three programs at Laurel for the Friday-Sunday period of Nov. 22-24.
Brown's retirement, announced by 1/ST Racing on Monday, Dec. 1, was effective immediately.
His interim replacement is Danny Finke, who has 40 years of experience on Maryland track crews.
When the commission on Tuesday asked for an explanation of what's going on with the Laurel surface, Mike Rogers, the executive vice president for 1/ST Racing, chose to address the issue by reading into the record an eight-minute prepared statement prior to fielding questions from commissioners.
Horsemen, jockeys, and 1/ST Racing have all had differing opinions over the past week about everything from sealing, floating and harrowing protocols to the binding ability of the track's cushion to how fast the tractors pull the equipment around the oval.
Rogers stated that as all parties try to work toward a consensus, helpful pieces of data are in the pipeline.
He said Overwish's necropsy report was delivered yesterday, and that Maryland's safety and welfare committee is scheduled to review it Thursday.
Samples from the track's cushion are being tested by outside labs to compare them to previous versions of the Laurel surface that had been deemed safe, and also to those of other comparable tracks considered safe, Rogers said.
The national Racing Surfaces Testing Laboratory will be at Laurel Dec. 4 to do biomechanical hoof testing on the surface, which Rogers said should yield additional info to help make decisions moving forward.
Rogers also said that the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority has inspected Laurel's surface and found no glaring inconsistencies. He noted that the track has been able to handle four days of racing in a row (Nov. 28-Dec. 1) without any safety incidents.
When asked specifically about Brown's departure, Rogers explained the situation by reading into the record the press release about Brown's retirement that 1/ST Racing had distributed Monday.
Rogers went off-script at the end to add, “Mr. Finke will lead the team for the month of December.”
Knauf, whose non-profit team takes control of operations from 1/ST Racing on Jan. 1, 2025, added that even after the search for a new superintendent is concluded, Finke will still retain a job on the Laurel/Pimlico maintenance team if he so chooses, as will all other current members of that crew.
With the management transition looming, Rogers urged all stakeholders to take into account what other racing industry leaders have underscored in the past regarding safety crises–that it can be difficult to pinpoint direct causes of racetrack accidents, which are often multi-factorial.
“There are other contributing factors,” Rogers said. “I know it's easy to point to the racetrack. But there are a lot of other contributing factors that can lead to a catastrophic breakdown. And generally, having these meetings with the necropsy [report] educates all of us as to other, maybe, contributing factors.”
David Richardson, the executive director of the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, summed up the situation this way: “The base appears to be in very good condition. There have been no complaints about the base of the racetrack. The concern is with the material itself, the new material that was added a just few weeks ago, and whether that sufficiently holds water or drains properly.
“We want a safe track,” Richardson continued. “We want to work with Maryland Jockey Club and have a safe track. [But] there is still some concern amongst people as to where we stand.”
Capuano said the problems at Laurel are not persistent–but they're not exactly new, either.
“It goes back a few years, in the same kind of issues [and] it wasn't right when they came in and re-did the track [two decades ago],” Capuano said. “And then a couple years ago, we had to try to re-do it again. And it was just a matter of the right material mixed in to make it hold together.”
“We've been working with this for a long time, trying to get it right,” Capuano said.
“It should be easy. The technology, the equipment, the science,” Capuano quipped, noting that in reality, maintaining a racetrack is far from simple. “You would think that it would just be a push-button, easy thing to take care of.”
Technology is helpful, Capuano continued. “But it's nothing like the [maintenance team] guys walking in the dirt that have that experience [to] know what it's like. They know what [the track] needs.
“I mean, nothing's perfect,” Capuano summed up. “Things are going to happen. But if we have the confidence that we send [horses] out there and [management's] done the best they can, that's all we're looking for.”
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