Erie slots parlor will also offer horse racing with top trainers

It’s not clear yet if casinos will make horse racing popular at the smaller venues.

ERIE, Pa. (AP) — For gamblers at western Pennsylvania’s first slots parlor, there’s a new game in town: horse racing.

Presque Isle Downs & Casino plans to open its newly built thoroughbred racetrack today, with daily prize money totaling roughly $500,000, a groundbreaking synthetic track and races with top-tier horses from across the country.

The facility is among many slots-driven racetracks that have sprung up nationwide since the early 1990s, helping to revive a struggling segment of the horse racing industry and perhaps attracting new fans.

MTR Gaming Group Inc., the Chester, W.Va., company that opened the Presque Isle casino six months ago, has built five large barns — with 100 stalls each — and plans to build five more before next season.

“This is a state-of-the-art facility,” said Jennifer See, Presque Isle Downs’ director of marketing.

The racetrack has planned eight races for today, including an inaugural stakes race with purse money of $100,000. A masters stakes race, with prize money of $400,000, is scheduled for Sept. 15 as part of the monthlong meet.

The promise of such rewards has drawn top trainers and put the track in league with established venues such as New York’s Saratoga and Kentucky’s Keeneland, according to racing experts and trainers.

Among the trainers with horses at Presque Isle Downs are Steve Asmussen, who trained Preakness winner Curlin, and Pennsylvania native Scott Lake. Asmussen’s Real Dandy, winner of the $750,000 West Virginia Derby two years ago, has a stall.

About 200 horses have arrived at the track so far, said Debbie Howells, the facility’s director of racing. The daily purse money will be lower next year, when races will be run from May through September, she said.

Like the casino, which has about 6,000 visitors a day, the racetrack is expected to attract fans mainly from western Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. The $250 million slots parlor opened Feb. 28, with 2,000 machines covering an area the size of a football field.

Spectators can watch the races from a bar and restaurant overlooking the track or an outdoor lot next to the oval, which is slightly longer than a mile. There are also more than 170 video monitors on the casino grounds.

The track’s all-weather surface, called Tapeta, is the first of its kind at a U.S. racetrack, though it’s been used at training facilities, according to Tom LaMarra, news editor of the industry magazine The Blood-Horse.

LaMarra said he had never seen a racetrack offer so much purse money during its opening meet. “Outside of, say, the major tracks in New York, California and Kentucky, no racetrack pays that kind of money,” he said.

It’s also unusual because Erie has not had live horse racing in two decades, since the closure of an earlier track — originally called Commodore Downs — where horses raced for purses of just $1,500 to $2,000, he said.

Though crowds have continued to grow at high-end racetracks such as Keeneland and California’s Del Mar, smaller tracks in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan have struggled to fill their stands, he said.

That’s partly because the smaller tracks have seasons of at least 200 days a year, while the bigger tracks hold races for just six weeks to two months a year and may be located in areas appealing to tourists. LaMarra said.

Tracks with longer meets generally have slot machines, he said. Racinos have opened in states such as Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, West Virginia and Iowa since the early 1990s. The casinos have helped raise money for purses and breeder awards, but it’s unclear whether they have boosted horse racing’s popularity, LaMarra said.