The storied Long Island racetrack, rebuilt with a $455m state loan, is smaller, sleeker and designed for a changing audience.
For the first time in more than three years, horses were racing at Belmont Park on Friday.
NYRA consolidated its downstate operation at Belmont, bringing an end to 132 years of racing at Aqueduct and leaving New York City without a thoroughbred racetrack for the first time since the 1821 opening of Union Course in what is now Woodhaven, Queens.
The new facility will stage a 46-day fall meet featuring 72 stakes worth $17.7m, before the Belmont Stakes returns next year and the Breeders’ Cup comes back to New York for the first time since 2005.
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The new facility will stage a 46-day fall meet featuring 72 stakes worth $17.7m, before the Belmont Stakes returns next year and the Breeders’ Cup comes back to New York.
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The storied Long Island racetrack, rebuilt with a $455m state loan, is smaller, sleeker and designed for a changing audience.
“It has to grow on me,” said Miller, a 59-year-old retired sanitation worker from Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood who has been coming to New York racetracks for 47 years.
For the first time in more than three years, horses were racing at Belmont Park on Friday.
What opened on Friday was not a renovated sports venue, but New York’s half-billion dollar wager that horse racing can shrink its physical footprint, upgrade the experience and find enough new customers to survive a gambling landscape that has moved beyond it.
NYRA consolidated its downstate operation at Belmont, bringing an end to 132 years of racing at Aqueduct and leaving New York City without a thoroughbred racetrack for the first time since the 1821 opening of Union Course in what is now Woodhaven, Queens.
The old structure was engineered for crowds of a scale that materialized outside the biggest racing days – like the 120,139 who turned out for Smarty Jones’ doomed Triple Crown bid in 2004.
The new facility will stage a 46-day fall meet featuring 72 stakes worth $17.7m, before the Belmont Stakes returns next year and the Breeders’ Cup comes back to New York for the first time since 2005.
McGaughey, a stalwart of New York racing who denied Sunday Silence the Triple Crown when Easy Goer won the Belmont in 1989, was enthusiastic about the rebuilt track even as he acknowledged the place was still finding its feet.
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