By T. D. Thornton
The Virginia Racing Commission (VRC) on Wednesday awarded a one-day pari-mutuel license for a six-race card of all-turf flat races at Great Meadow on Sunday, Sept. 20.
Purses will total $150,000, said David Lermond Jr., the deputy executive secretary of the VRC. The licensee is the Virginia Gold Cup Association, which traditionally hosts two single-day steeplechase events at that same venue, one each in the spring and fall.
The Gold Cup Association will host the races in conjunction with the non-profit Virginia Equine Alliance (VEA), which is working on both short- and long-range plans to fund purses for a series of Thoroughbred meets in the state that could be folded into a larger regional circuit.
Virginia has been without a dedicated Thoroughbred venue since 2013, when Colonial Downs last operated an extended summer flat meet.
The Maryland Jockey Club has been recruited to process entries for the Sept. 20 program, Lermond said. The races will utilize a flag start rather than a gate.
Lermond said plans for an expanded meet in 2016 at Morven Park (an equestrian center in Leesburg that hosted steeplechase and limited flat racing until three years ago) were discussed, but not voted upon, at Wednesday's VRC meeting.
“[The VEA] did not have an agreement with Morven Park ready to be approved by the commission,” Lermond said. “However, in the budget for the VEA, they were hoping to run eight days at Morven Park in 2016.”
Great Meadow annually draws some 75,000 fans for the storied Virginia Gold Cup steeplechase on the first Saturday in May (this year's program also included four flat races). The Sept. 20 flat races will be run five weeks before the International Gold Cup on Oct. 24. The course is located in a northern Virginia town called The Plains, which is about 50 miles west of Washington, D.C.
“This will be the first time that we're putting these flat races together under this new concept of country racing, as opposed to doing them at one big race track,” Will Allison, president of the Virginia Gold Cup, told the publication Leesburg Today earlier this week.
Not a subscriber? Click here to sign up for the daily PDF or alerts.
