Following a spring meet at Churchill Downs with record wagering, racing shifts in Kentucky to Ellis Park in Henderson beginning July 4. The historic, fair-like track, located in Western Kentucky, will conduct a 25-day season through Aug. 25.
Ellis Park, like Churchill Downs and Turfway Park in the state, is owned by Churchill Downs Inc., which acquired the aging Ellis Park property in 2022.
Maiden purses at Ellis Park are $71,000—far shy of the $120,000 offered at Churchill for such runners—but ahead of most American tracks racing this summer, with purses buoyed by revenue generated from slot-like historical horse racing gaming across the state. Saratoga Race Course is expected to have the highest domestic purses this summer before Kentucky Downs' lucrative meet Aug. 29-Sept. 11.
Except for those traveling to Saratoga or Colonial Downs, many of Kentucky's top riders, trainers, and horses will be in competition this summer at Ellis.
Watch: CDI's Palmisano Discusses Meet Openings at Ellis Park, Colonial Downs
Stakes purses this year at Ellis are a record $3.7 million, spread across 18 races, beginning with opening day's $125,000 Dade Park Dash Stakes for 3-year-old grass sprinters. A field of eight is entered, led by Joe Shiesty, a front-running winner of the May 1 William Walker Stakes at Churchill Downs.
Eighty-nine horses were entered to race on the opening-day card, plus an additional 13 also-eligibles. Large fields have also been drawn for three other race days over opening week.
Several wagers at Ellis Park will offer a horseplayer-friendly 15% takeout: two daily Pick 5s, a $3 All Turf Pick 3, and the 20-cent Dade Park Pick 6.
Ellis Park's stakes lineup has one graded stakes race Aug. 4: the $400,000 Pucker Up Stakes (G3T), formerly a stakes fixture at Arlington International Race Course. It was moved to Ellis Park after CDI closed the Chicago-area track and sold the property to the National Football League's Chicago Bears.
Besides the Pucker Up, the other major races on the Ellis Park stakes schedule center around six other black-type contests during Kentucky Downs Preview Weekend, Aug. 3-4. These races range in value from $250,000 to $300,000. For years, Kentucky Downs has transferred purse funds to Ellis Park to bolster the Kentucky circuit.
The Ellis Park season will begin on a Thursday-Sunday schedule during the opening week of holiday racing before shifting to Saturday-Monday schedule from July 13-Aug. 26.
"So we're exploring this as an experiment a bit to see if we can grow the wagering handle on a Monday afternoon," said Gary Palmisano, CDI's vice president of racing.
Daily first post time is 11:50 a.m. CT.
Changes made during the off-season at Ellis Park include a new grandstand roof, new camera towers, the redoing of six barns, and a new water treatment facility.
"You're not going to see the soybeans out in the infield anymore, which is, I know, a soft spot for many," Palmisano said of the farming that resulted in Ellis Park's nickname of "The Pea Patch." "But that's part of a backside improvement project that we did from a water drainage scenario, where we needed to have a retention pond to capture water draining off the backside. So that's sort of as an example of one of the projects that we had to get done, and there's numerous other projects that we wanted to do from sort of a safety and environmental aspect of the facility that we knocked out for Ellis Park."
