A trying year at Assiniboia Downs

Bettors may be used to experiencing bad luck at Assiniboia Downs. The track itself, nearing the tail end of what had been a wildly successful season, has been subjected to an unprecedented run of it lately.

Intense smoke from wildfires has wiped out not one, but two different nights of live action — the first time anyone can remember that happening. High winds blew away a third. And in the most recent meet on Wednesday, horses in consecutive races had to be euthanized, while a jockey narrowly escaped disaster after tumbling from his mount.

“I’ve spent over 40 years working here. I have honestly never seen that here before,” Darren Dunn, the chief executive officer of ASD, said Thursday of the back-to-back deaths. “It’s nothing you ever get used to. Any time that happens is one too many.”

To put such a tragic event into perspective, there had been 42 previous nights of racing this season and not a single horse had gone down. Then, in almost the blink of an eye, everything changed on night 43.

In the fifth race, the horse named Viral took a fall, along with jockey Sven Balroop who just missed being trampled by a horse behind him. During the ensuing chaos, jockey Chavion Chow also came off his horse, Dubd Saint Angel, who crossed the finish line without a rider but was otherwise unharmed.

Viral was attended to by animal physicians, while Balroop remained down for some time as paramedics and colleagues rushed to his side. He was ultimately diagnosed with a bruised tailbone and remained at the track. The Kevlar vest he was wearing underneath his silks, which is standard fare for jockeys, may have saved him from greater harm.

“You never want to see anybody kiss the ground in any way shape or form, but he came out of it OK,” Dunn said.

“My first thought was that he just got the wind knocked out of him, and that’s probably why he wasn’t moving much initially. The force and the speed, going like 40 m.p.h. and falling from six feet in the air and hitting the ground, you’re going to feel it.

The news wasn’t nearly as good for Viral.

“I wish I could provide a better update, but he was humanely euthanized,” said Dunn. “There was some speculation it was caused by horses clipping heels because they were really close.”

After a lengthy delay, the sixth race was run and saw Rigged Right slow down and veer right during the first turn, clearly in distress.

“Unfortunately, that horse had a lower leg injury. There was speculation he had a pre-existing issue that was agitated,” said Dunn. “It can be that fickle. One bad step can create an unfortunate outcome.”

According to Dunn, ASD had four horses die in the 2022 season out of a total of 2,450 starts, for an average of 1.63 per 1,000 starts. That’s in line with similar years, and among the lowest rates in North America. With the final night of 2023 racing just two weeks away, they were looking at perhaps an incident-free season until Wednesday.

“You take a pause, you gather yourself and you try to figure out what happened and try to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Dunn. “This is never taken lightly or never taken for granted, that’s for damn sure.”

Wednesday was supposed to actually be the 46th night of racing in a calendar that had 50 dates on it. But poor air quality caused by Canadian wildfires forced the cancellation of the Aug. 15 meet, and again this past Tuesday night. Ultimately, it’s the provincial veterinarian who makes the call.

“I’ll tell you what, this is very new to us. It wasn’t something that had even been on our radar,” said Dunn, noting tracks in several other provinces have also had to cancel races. “Now, in our minds, it’s the new normal.”

The Aug. 16 card was also scrubbed when winds gusting in excess of 80 km/h made it too dangerous to ride. The first race went as scheduled before the plug was pulled.

“The jockeys wanted to go out and give it a try. They came back and said, you know, it just doesn’t feel comfortable. And that’s not something we would balk at,” said Dunn.

“Listen, they’re 115 pounds, six feet in the air going 40 m.p.h. I full on respect not feeling comfortable. That wasn’t a hard decision to make. We’re in the animal husbandry business, the athlete business with the jockeys, and we’re out in a farmer’s field that is completely wide open and unprotected. So high winds can take down a race card. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time in a long time.”

Dunn noted that they promise horse owners, trainers and jockeys a full 50 race season, so some scrambling had to take place to play catch-up. They ultimately added additional races to some nights to make up for the six that were lost on Aug. 16, and they’ve now added two bonus nights of racing — Sept. 13 and Sept. 20 — to make up for Aug. 15 and Sept. 5. The 2023 season had been slated to end on Sept. 19.

“We have a lot of people who financially count on this,” said Dunn. “We can’t just short them, so we will stand on our head to do business with them and show them that Friendly Manitoba is fair, open and honest and we make it happen and we make it fit.”

To that extent, Dunn is hoping for nothing but clear skies and good fortune down the home stretch, especially since this had been such a strong summer. Attendance is up, the Manitoba Derby set new records and per-race wagering has grown about 10 per cent year-over-year, which Dunn says is “a big number that’s hard to do.”

“We’ve got a product that local and international folks continue to be interested in,” he said.

“This is some of the best horses I’ve seen race at Assiniboia Downs. There’s been exciting finishes. It’s been an extremely, extremely safe meet. No question there’s been more positives than negatives, but there’s been a bit of a…I’m not even sure what the word is, but our share of funk at times that sometimes has you driving home at night, wondering how that can happen.”

mike.mcintyre@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @mikemcintyrewpg

Mike McIntyre
Sports reporter

Mike McIntyre grew up wanting to be a professional wrestler. But when that dream fizzled, he put all his brawn into becoming a professional writer.

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