Arlington, Horsemen Strike a Deal to Open 2020 Season

Arlington International Racecourse and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association struck a last-minute contract June 17, opening the way to an abbreviated summer race meeting at the showcase Chicago-area track.

Both sides and Illinois Racing Board commissioner Thomas McCauley, who helped negotiate the accord during more than a week of stressful talks, said they expect the two-year agreement to be finalized and signed in time for an IRB meeting June 18.

Absent an agreement, there would have been no racing at Arlington this season, and the future of the iconic track would have been in doubt.

"Arlington and the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association have reached a tentative agreement for the 2020 and 2021 race meets," the track reported in a Wednesday statement. "Final details of the agreement are being drafted and expected to be signed later today."

ITHA executive director David McCaffrey confirmed, "I think we have a deal. It's tentative until details are put on paper and signed."

The track said, pending signatures on the contract and IRB approval, it will open the backstretch on or before July 6 "to welcome owners and trainers back to their home track" and conduct its first races July 23 without spectators. The season will continue three days a week on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through Sept. 30.

Daily post time will be 2 p.m CT.

There will be no stakes races with the Arlington Million (G1T) mothballed for the first time since 1989 and 1990, when the track was shut down in a political and economic dispute. The Million is expected to return in 2021. 

Arlington and the ITHA had been at loggerheads for months over a contract for 2020 and 2021. Absent an agreement, the IRB at its June 18 meeting was poised to shift the dwindling remnants of simulcast earnings from Arlington to Hawthorne Race Course to help fund that track's late-season Thoroughbred meeting.

With a finalized agreement in place, the meeting instead will consider Arlington's revised dates proposal and a proposed restructuring of the Hawthorne schedule. Arlington optimistically also included an agenda item requesting approval of racing officials. Arlington was to have opened the 2020 Illinois Thoroughbred season May 1—a plan that fell victim to the state-mandated COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. As those precautions were eased, Arlington at first refused to set an opening date, citing financial considerations of racing without spectators and the lack of a contract with the ITHA.

Under pressure from the Racing Board, Arlington relented on conducting racing without spectators, but the track said that without the legally mandated contract with horsemen, it would not be able to set a starting date for racing, bring back furloughed employees, open the backstretch, or do track prep work. The board repeatedly extended its deadline for an agreement but was running out of time to salvage a race meeting at Arlington.

McCauley organized and moderated many hours of meetings between the parties, spread over five days and starting, socially distanced but face-to-face, on the Hawthorne apron. For more than a week, the final issue was how to allocate purse money in the second year of a contract between overnights and stakes.

"Commissioner McCauley did a terrific job, unparalleled in my recent memory," McCaffrey said.