Ellis Park is important to owner Churchill Downs Inc. for its role in providing a venue for summertime thoroughbred racing and helping keep horsemen, and horses, in Kentucky year-round, according to its CEO.
“Ellis Park is now such an important part of our circuit in Kentucky,” CEO William Carstanjen told a sold-out Henderson Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner audience in the racetrack’s Sky Theatre Monday evening.
But while acknowledging that Ellis Park had become run down under previous owners before Churchill Downs reacquired it three years ago—and remarking on Churchill’s $100 million investment on an off-track gambling facility in Owensboro—Carstanjen promised only “incremental improvements” at Ellis focused on critical infrastructure.
“There was a lot of neglect of this facility over a couple of decades,” he said.
“Infrastructure is the first thing we have to fix,” Carstanjen told the chamber crowd.
“We’ll address one thing at a time. First things first,” he said. A $10 million grandstand roof replacement and construction of new racetrack camera towers have been among those initial projects.
Carstanjen didn’t, however, articulate a specific plan for addressing brown water flowing from faucets at the racetrack, including in the Sky Theatre, which he attributed to the track’s iconic but aging elevated water tank.
“The water tank is causing us to have brown water,” he said.
As for the fan experience during live racing meets, Carstanjen said track officials “listened to communities about what they want” and determined that patrons mostly want the grandstand to “be clean, spruced up.”
Ellis Park’s infield, long known affectionately, or derisively, as the “pea patch” for the track’s past practice of using it for growing soybeans, is being converted to a lake for what Carstanjen called “animal refuse concentration” because the track “is not in compliance with CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) standards” for manure pollution.
“We didn’t do it for beautification purposes,” he said of the new infield lake. “It’s the best way to address a serious federal compliance issue.”
As for the previous owner’s once-bright plans for a hotel complex to be constructed at Ellis Park, Carstanjen made such prospects clear: “I don’t see a hotel here.”
Meanwhile, he painted a bright picture for Churchill Downs Inc. (CDI) and the current state of horseracing in Kentucky.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, he said, Kentucky wasn’t competitive with other states. To draw bettors, races need to offer attractive odds. To boost odds, tracks need plenty of horses in each race. To attract horses, tracks need to offer ample purses, or prize money, for the horse owners.
In those days, Carstanjen said, Kentucky was losing market share to states such as Indiana—where profits from on-track casinos, or “racinos,” boosted purses—as well as New York, California, Florida and Arkansas, some of which subsidized purses.
A change in Kentucky legislation more than a decade ago permitted wagering on “historical horse races”—“similar to slot machines,” Carstanjen acknowledged—that pumped money into Kentucky’s horse tracks and their race purses.
Statewide race purses that years ago totaled $75 million have since swelled to $210 million, drawing horses back to Kentucky tracks.
“It’s why our product has become so attractive,” Carstanjen said.
Still, he said, CDI had to “diversify,” which meant it had to “lose some tracks that did not make sense to us.”
For example, CDI in 2023 sold the former Arlington Park racecourse in suburban Chicago—once a venue for the Breeders’ Cup, a premier day of thoroughbred racing—where the NFL’s Chicago Bears organization now plans a new stadium.
Perhaps more importantly, CDI navigated the expanding market for online gambling by launching its Twin Spires online gaming platform and app.
“Twin Spires went way better than planned,” Carstanjen said. “It was a rocket ship.”
As a result of such moves and other developments, he said publicly traded CDI, whose total stock value (or market capitalization) was worth around $350 million in 2005, today totals nearly $10 billion. CDI’s stock price was largely flat for decades, but started rising around 2014, and especially since 2020.
After buying back Ellis Park (which Churchill Downs first acquired in 1998 and sold in 2006 to Ron Geary, a sale that Carstanjen said “I opposed”), CDI today owns four tracks around Kentucky, including Louisville’s Churchill Downs, Turfway Park in Northern Kentucky, Oak Grove Racing south of Hopkinsville and Ellis Park.
Offering 25 dates of live racing this year between July 4 and Aug. 26, Ellis Park “is now such an important part of our circuit in Kentucky,” Carstanjen said.
“The bulk of the race dates in Kentucky are under the Churchill Downs umbrella,” he said. “Ellis Park is a critical part of that.”
Improved purses are crucial to Ellis’ prospects, having improved from $9 million in 2022 to $16 million for this year’s live race meet.
More purse money, more horses, longer odds, more bets. It’s the key to Ellis Park’s future.
