Festival gets exciting new look for 2020
July rang in and out with major announcements from Oaklawn Park, arousing interest during the dog days of summer at a track where the next live racing is in January.
Oaklawn has been in the sports-betting business for one month, something that should reach a fevered pitch as football season nears. Giving or taking points on a football game, or playing parlays, seems more exciting than deciding whether two baseball teams exceed or fall short of a football-like over/ under estimate of total runs. We’re sure to learn more on Aug. 31, the first major Saturday of college football, when business should be especially lively in back of Oaklawn’s casinos and around betting kiosks within.
On Wednesday, Oaklawn issued next year’s stakes schedule, reflecting the track’s second season of expanded racing and answering a question that intrigues this observer: Whatever happened to the Racing Festival of the South?
Remember the RFS, which the late Terry Wallace, Oaklawn’s longtime track announcer, dutifully called “the most prestigious week of racing in North America”?
Then-track president Charles J. Cella, envisioning the horseyard on Central Avenue as “Saratoga of the South,” played the showman’s role to the hilt in the early 1970s, scheduling a stakes race per day in the last week of the meeting. Then racing six days per week (closed Sunday), the track would hold, say, the Fantasy Stakes on the penultimate Saturday and follow with the Apple Blossom Handicap on Wednesday, the Count Fleet Sprint Handicap on Thursday, the Oaklawn Handicap on Friday and the show-topping Arkansas Derby on closing Saturday.
One of Cella’s friends is said to have supplied the name: “Why not call it a festival?” And thus the Racing Festival of the South, like the dogwoods in bloom, signals the end of another Oaklawn season, a concept copied by many racetracks here and aboard.
The festival received immediate credibility in racing circles when West Coast-based trainer Charles Whittingham shipped in a star filly and brought a friend along to ride. Oaklawn presented jockey Bill Shoemaker a trophy for his 100th victory in a
$100,000 stakes race when Miss Musket took the 1974 Fantasy.
A roll call of idols from past festivals could fill the rest of this column. Just don’t ask me to rank them, although no such list would be complete without Cigar (1995 Oaklawn Handicap), Smarty Jones (2004 Arkansas Derby) and Zenyatta (2008 and
‘10 Apple Blossom).
Sadly, at least to this 40-year chronicler of Oaklawn racing, the festival has lost something in recent years. Though still an April page marker, it requires a scorecard to keep track of the races. The Arkansas Derby remains on Saturday, though no longer closing the meet. New stakes races pop up and old favorites vanish. (I cannot understand why the first Oaklawn season extending into May did not include the Northern Spur, which Cella named after his Eclipse Award-winning Breeders’ Cup Turf hero in 1995. Of course, to give it some verisimilitude, the Northern Spur needs to be on grass, and Oaklawn lacks a grass course. A topic for another day perhaps.)
Lest anyone think the Racing Festival of the South a passe concept, Oaklawn’s 2020 stakes schedule looks like a response to conditions.
Kicking off a new decade, the 2020 festival includes three
$1 million races, the Arkansas Derby April 11 and the Apple Blossom Handicap and the Oaklawn Handicap April 18. That’s a slight tweak from this year, when Oaklawn’s two Grade 1 events framed the traditional closing weekend, Omaha Beach
winning the Arkansas Derby on Saturday and Midnight Bisou the Apple Blossom on Sunday. The Oaklawn Handicap (Grade 2) and Apple Blossom are carded together again after once highlighting what the track called “Million Dollar Saturday” because of their $500,000 purses.
The Carousel, once for older males, is more important than ever for older fillies and mares, receiving a $50,000 bump to $200,000 for its new spot on the Derby Day card. April 11 also brings major races for older horses, the $250,000 Oaklawn Mile and the Grade 3 $500,000 Count Fleet Sprint Handicap.
Louis Cella, Oaklawn’s dynamic young president, has his late father’s flair for the dramatic. Charles Cella could not bring off his dream race, an Apple Blossom pairing of champions Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra in 2010, but his son might.
“My father conceived the idea for the Racing Festival of the South in 1974 and since that’s time it’s become one of the most prominent events on the national racing calendar,” Cella said in a release Wednesday. “I think he would be thrilled to see the purses of the Oaklawn Handicap and Apple Blossom at $1 million each.”
Oaklawn patrons recognize something good on sight and are sure to pack the track on those special days. Which begs another question: With all the construction going on, where will they park the cars?