Race season cancelled again at Marquis Downs

The thoroughbred horse-racing season has been cancelled in Saskatoon for a second straight year.

Organizers held off until midjune last season before declaring there was no way to proceed because of restrictions caused by COVID -19. Now, in February, they can't see a path forward at Marquis Downs in 2021.

“There's a lot of factors to deciding not to run horse racing this year,” said Kristy Rempel, the manager of marketing at Saskatoon's Prairieland Park. “But a lot of it has to do with not much has changed since March of 2020. We really can't have fans in the stands; we can't get the jockeys from the Caribbean, and we aren't currently set up to be able to go just simulcast. That's not an option for our infrastructure right now.

“In order to run horse racing we have to have fans in the stands and jockeys, and without those two things, it makes it really difficult.”

With no sign of better days in the short-term, and with the pandemic's long-term prospects still a matter of conjecture, they made an early decision to call the season off in hopes of returning for 2022.

Seventy-six per cent of Marquis Downs jockeys come from the Caribbean. Prairieland Park said in a release that “travel restrictions, quarantine requirements, visa approvals and extremely limited airline scheduling to the Caribbean meant that Prairieland could not commit to a race meet this year.”

Marquis Downs, a five-furlong oval, had run for 50 consecutive seasons before losing 2020. The pandemic has affected Prairieland Park greatly — a 90 per cent reduction in operations, an 82 per cent decline in net profit, and projected losses of more than $2 million.

Difficult decisions last year included the cancellation of the Saskatoon Exhibition. Rempel said there's no current timeline on a 2021 Ex decision.

“Being closed for an entire year really makes for hard decisions, and horse racing was one of those,” Rempel said.

“The restrictions have taken their toll on a lot of the event industry. Our partners, the hoteliers and the other major trading conventions and spaces in the city ... this is one of many difficult decisions we're all making as we navigate. We really don't know what the future will hold. We don't know what a vaccine will do, we don't know when those things will happen. We can only make our decisions based on what's immediately in front of us, and how likely we think those things are going to change in the very immediate future.”