By Alexander LaCasse, news correspondent
Janelle Campbell watched the legendary horse Cigar win two big races at Suffolk Downs with her aunt, who was a jockey herself. Campbell dreamed of following in her aunt’s footsteps and winning a race in her backyard at the mile-long track in Revere.
Now a veteran jockey of three years, the 18-time race winner (twice at Suffolk Downs) will be racing this Sunday for the last time at the track she and so many others call home. As a result of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission’s decision to award Wynn Resorts the Boston area gaming license, the track and its staff are left without a project or hope for a future.
“What bothers me most is that if we don’t run, it’s like destroying a family,” Campbell, now a 30-year-old Revere resident, said. “I grew up with everybody here, I know everybody and everyone in the grandstands knows everybody. It’s a family.”
Saturday will mark the last thoroughbred horse race to take place in New England as Suffolk Downs will host its final race after its initial opening in 1935. Other thoroughbred tracks in the region have all closed. Suffolk Downs, where national sensation Seabiscuit was first discovered by trainer Tom Smith in 1936, will be the last to close.
“It’s a very difficult time for all of us who have dedicated our lives to this sport and this place,” Jessica Paquette, director of communications at Suffolk Downs, said. “You spend so much time with these people because horse racing isn’t a typical nine to five job. It’s 365 days a year.”
The local horse racing industry was estimated to provide 1,200 permanent and seasonal jobs, according to a Fox Business report. Many of these workers will face the looming prospect of unemployment after the Massachusetts Gaming Commission rejected Conn. casino Mohegan Sun’s $1.1 billion proposal to build a casino up around the racetrack and keep it open for racing.
The Mohegan Sun project would have created 2,500 construction jobs and over 4,000 permanent jobs according to project estimates. However, the Wynn Resort proposal was a bigger project with more jobs to be created, according to the Boston Globe.
“We are all in a state of uncertainty,” Paquette said. “[A casino] would have been amazing. The economic growth for Revere would have been extraordinary and growth for the racetrack and for horse racing and breeding in Massachusetts. The money would have extended all over the state into the agricultural business as well.”
Suffolk Downs has lost $60 million in the last seven years, according to a Fox Business report. There is a possibility that racing could be held at Brockton Fairgrounds, but whether Raynham Park Director George Carney will submit the necessary paperwork remains to be seen.
For horse racing fans young and old, all that may remain are memories from race days at Suffolk Downs.
“I started working here two days a week before my senior year of high school, and every summer I kept coming back,” Dino Difronzo, a 21-year-old track intern from Medford, said. “At this year’s Kentucky Derby day, there was the most excitement I’ve ever seen here. The place was packed.”
Longtime Boston Herald racetrack correspondent Lynne Snierson credits her early days of covering races at Suffolk Downs with starting her career. She began covering horse racing nationally, which took her from Boston to Miami to St. Louis and back again.
“One day in ’87, my sports editor overheard me talking about how much I like horses, and he said, ‘Go over to the racetrack and come back with a story,’” Snierson said. “And that was the day I fell in love with thoroughbred racing and the racetrack. It launched me on a whole new aspect of my career.”
The Mohegan Sun and Suffolk Downs put up a good fight in the chase for the Boston casino license, and Paquette mostly laments that a Revere casino might have put the racetrack’s best days ahead of it rather than behind.
“It’s a blue-collar track in a kind of a blue-collar area that works really hard,” Paquette said. “I really believe in Suffolk Downs and I believe in all the hardworking people who have spent their lives here.”
Photo by Alexander LaCasse
