The 4800 Preakness Cap is Low. Should Expectations Be Even Lower?

Back in 1988, attendance for the GI Preakness Stakes at Laurel Race Course was 7,372.

By 2002, the Preakness crowd at the renamed Laurel Park had more than doubled, to 15,917.

Of course, those figures from decades ago weren’t for the in-person, live running of the second jewel of the Triple Crown.

Those head counts represent only people who turned out for Laurel’s simulcast of the Preakness.

The race itself was conducted 28 miles north at the Preakness’s traditional Baltimore home, Pimlico Race Course.

In that era, the Preakness throng at Pimlico ranged between 80,000 and 105,000. Attendance for Maryland’s biggest day of racing eventually spiked to the 130,000-140,000 range by the mid-2010s.

Provided here for context, those simulcast-only attendances from yesteryear stand in stark contrast to last week’s news that the 2026 Preakness-which on May 16 really will be run at Laurel because of ongoing construction of the new “Pimlico Plus” facility-will have its crowd capacity limited to 4,800.

I’ll bet I wasn’t the only person who skimmed that “4,800” headline in last Tuesday’s TDN and thought a digit had been accidently lopped off.

Ever since the announcement of the $500-million rebuild that will consolidate all Thoroughbred racing in Maryland at Pimlico (except for Timonium Fair), racegoers have been expecting a modest-capacity, gap-year Preakness experience at Laurel for 2026 only.

But up until last week, officials at the Maryland Jockey Club (MJC), the non-profit that runs day-to-day racing in the state, and The Stronach Group (TSG), which formerly owned and operated both Pimlico and Laurel-but still retains rights to the Preakness-had never quantified exactly what “modest” meant in terms of an attendance capacity.

Last year’s announced attendance for the Preakness at Pimlico was reported as a two-day, round-number blend of 63,000 that also lumped in people who came out for that Friday’s GII Black-Eyed Susan Stakes card.

Laurel lacks the spacious infield that Pimlico afforded. The bulk of its grandstand seating was ripped out years ago and never replaced. And there is only one main road in and out of Laurel.

Everybody knew all that going into this season. So it was realistic to temper expectations for the 2026 temporary transition of the Preakness.

My guess for a Preakness crowd cap at Laurel would have been in the ballpark of 18,000 to 23,000. That’s based on attendances for the well-received Maryland Million Day programs the track hosted during the 2010s decade.

Instead, the shockingly low number-disclosed only the day before Preakness ticket packages went on sale, and first reported by Matt Hegarty of Daily Racing Form-was revealed to be 4,800.

Think about that for a moment: For an actual, live Triple Crown race, Laurel in 2026 will permit in only a fractional number of the fans that the track welcomed to watch the Preakness on TV nearly 40 years ago.

As part of its deal with the state, TSG (also known as 1/ST Racing and Gaming) is running the Preakness in 2026.

The MJC, which is helping this year, will take over operations in 2027, when the Preakness is scheduled to return to Pimlico-even though the new facility still will not be fully built.

After this year, TSG is to get paid roughly $5 million annually going forward in a long-term licensing deal for the Preakness, according to terms of the agreement recently published by the Baltimore Banner.

So what, exactly, is TSG attempting to accomplish by setting the bar so low for the final Preakness it will directly control?

Is the plan to establish bare-bones expectations and then over-deliver on the experience of the event in what TSG envisions as a more intimate setting?

Or will an underwhelming crowd at the ill-equipped Laurel simply not be able to match the energy level of the masses that traditionally fuels the gravitas of the Preakness, rendering the experience an overpriced dud?

The bottom line is that either way, now that TSG has exited day-to-day Maryland racing, there isn’t much incentive for the company to go to extensive lengths to put on a great show under the arduous circumstances of Laurel’s poor infrastructure.

Within the industry, TSG is currently getting batted around like a pinata, and many of the company’s woes are self-inflicted.

In recent years TSG has pulled the plug on racing at Portland Meadows and Golden Gate Fields,  and in many aspects is leaving Maryland racing in a worse-off state than when the company acquired Pimlico and Laurel 15 years ago.

TSG is also currently embroiled in a controversial “decoupling” attempt in Florida to sever its live racing obligation from its casino privileges at Gulfstream Park.

And just last week, TSG was instrumental in lobbying for the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) to deny permits for two geographically distant Northern California fairs to conduct short race meets in 2026 out of concern that the TSG-owned Santa Anita Park, which has been financially strained in recent seasons, would suffer because of lost simulcasting revenue.

At that Feb. 27 CHRB meeting, the board’s vice-chair, Oscar Gonzales, openly questioned why other commissioners were deferring to the TSG-backed plan to consolidate all of California’s racing in the Southern part of the state, where Santa Anita tenuously remains the flagship track.

“We see what [TSG has] done in Maryland,” Gonzales said. “We see what they’re doing in Florida. But we’re willing to put all of our chips [in SoCal, essentially on Santa Anita] rather than spreading them out?”

The number of GI Kentucky Derby starters who went on to compete in the Preakness began to really tail off around the same time TSG took over Maryland racing in 2011.

That decline is certainly not the outright fault of TSG. It is actually more attributable to the “less is more” training methodology that has cycled into vogue over the past several decades.

But it did happen during TSG’s stewardship of Maryland racing.

Historically, the resilient Preakness has been able to overachieve by making the most out of being an “event” as much as a horse race.

And in all fairness, even if you didn’t like some of the company’s specific ideas, TSG did try to capitalize on and boost the entertainment aspect of the Preakness as best as it could.

At the moment, the legacy of the Preakness under TSG spans roughly from Kegasus (the beer-swilling centaur mascot who was introduced just before TSG took control of Pimlico and Laurel in 2011) to the cryptocurrency craze that spawned TSG’s issuance of Preakness-themed non-fungible tokens in 2021 (a highly speculative collectibles concept that few people in the racing world understood before the marketplace for them completely cratered within a year).

But now it looks like we’ll have to leave room in the record books to see whether the 2026 Preakness attendance cap of 4,800 needs to have its own unique chapter written up in better-than-expected terms, or if the idea fizzles to the point where it’s just a footnote describing a dubious move at a precarious time for the Preakness.