Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem, Oct. 10, 2024

A good Thursday morning to you all! I hope everyone is having a good day, and most importantly sending good wishes to all my friends in Florida. I’m typing this as the hurricane has just passed through the western shore, waiting to hear from my neighbors about how my house and our neighborhood was able to get through the storm. 

Of course, I'm very concerned with how Tampa Bay Downs is able to handle the storm as they’re in more of a flood zone than I am at my house. Obviously hurricanes are part of living in Florida, but not being from there, it’s still very new and terrifying as a newer resident. Also I find myself rooting for the storms to go away from my home and workplace, but then feel guilty because you’re just rooting for someone else to have to deal with it all. It’s just a bad situation all the way around.

Everyone who has asked me about my house and job from outside of racing generally asked, “What happens to the horses during a storm like this?” Well, luckily for us we have no horses on the grounds right now. I believe the backside is scheduled to open up in two or three weeks from now. I’m not sure if that’s too kind of a coincidence with hurricane season wrapping up each year or just how they’ve always done it.

This whole thing made me think about the Fair Grounds meeting back in 2005-06, post-hurricane Katrina. If you don’t remember, Fair Grounds suffered lots of damage to the property and ended up moving its winter meet up to Louisiana Downs in Shreveport and ran a somewhat abbreviated version of their meet. I just remember it seeming so strange hearing John G. Dooley call “Fair Grounds” races from Bossier City. 

I suppose racetracks in general have been no strangers to natural and human disasters. The fire at Arlington Park way back when. An earthquake during the race at Hollywood Park. Even earlier this summer, Tropical Storm Debby left behind so much water across the eastern U.S. that many tracks had to cancel, including Saratoga.

Mother Nature usually wins the battle over our game when she puts her best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) foot forward. At Colonial Downs, we’re always so dependent on avoiding rain and lightning because we run so much on the grass. This year, we had a stretch where we had a few cards get canceled midway through because of really heavy thundershowers. 

Weather will always impact games played outside, and ours will most certainly always be played outside. Someone asked me once why we don’t just make the tracks with a dome over the top? Could you imagine a dome that was over a quarter-mile long? That’d be something to see. It would be crazy, though, to hear a big crowd reverberate inside of a dome as horses came down the lane.

I try to remind listeners to the podcast that as horseplayers we have to be vigilant with keeping an eye on the weather, especially in the days of the popular horizontal wagers. It generally takes two hours for a Pick 5 sequence to start and finish, and when you have different surfaces involved, that’s a pretty big window of time for weather to come and knock a race off the turf or just go from fast to sloppy. You have to try to account for it as best as you can, but I know that’s often easier said than done.

Anyways, let’s hope the storm damage was minimal, and I hope wherever you’re playing this weekend the weather is good and the action on the track is better.