Plenty of Racing Material: Reservations Indicate Hawthorne Will Top All Chicago Tracks, Daily Racing Form, 1934-07-20

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PLENTY OF RACING MATERIAL ♦ ■ Reservations Indicate Hawthorne Will Top All Chicago Tracks. » Cicero Programs to Feature Popular Long Distance Races — Condition Book Pleases Owners. ♦ The shortage of race horses that was expected to develop during the summer — with more new race tracks put into operation this year than ever before — seems certain to pass Hawthorne by. When the thirty-day meeting with which the west side race course carries on the Chicago turf program opens on July 30, it is likely that there will be more horses stabled at Hawthorne than at any previous meeting. With the meeting a fortnight away, stable reservations are at capacity; for more than a week new requests for accommodations have either been turned down, or have been taken care of in the barns at the adjacent Sportsmans Park track. The opening of racing at Hawthorne will see more than 1,200 fit horses on hand and ready to race. One reason for the popularity of this years Hawthorne meeting is that the conditions of every race have been written with the abilities of the horses that will be stabled at the track in mind. In other years the stake program at the west side track has attracted outstanding handicap performers that were shipped to Hawthorne for a single stake, and then shipped back to New York after they had captured the purse. The new Hawthorne policy of catering to the thoroughbreds that race at the track all during the meeting has made many prominent stables decide to keep their horses in Chicago all during the season. One of the worries that beset every racing secretary is that the meeting for which he plans races will attract an unsually high percentage of horses that are mere sprinters, and that his handicap and allowance races for horses of the better sort will all have to be over short distances. The racing public likes to watch horses run over distances greater than a mile, but because there are more sprinters than route-runners among the good horses, the staging of long races is sometimes a difficult matter. The rush of early stable reservations has given racing secretary Francis Dunne an unusual line upon the individual horses that will be running at Hawthorne, however, and a survey which he completed Continued on nineteenth page. PLENTY OF RACING MATERIAL Continued from first page. among the horsemen recently has assured him that there will be plenty of route runners of class in the equine population at Hawthorne. So high is the percentage of stayers, in fact, that it now seems certain that four of the eight races daily will be over the longer distances, and that it will be possible to make half of the overnight handicaps, which will furnish the backbone of the meeting at distances greater than a mile. The race followers who have been visiting Hawthorne for many seasons will find many changes in both plant and personnel at the Cicero track this year. There has been an entire change of stewards, with Francis Dunne, C. W. Hay, and Chris. FitzGerald scheduled for service in the stand. There will be a new starter in the person of Jack Hodgins, veteran of many years of service at the Kentucky and Maryland tracks. The most important of the physical innovations is the "electric eye," an infra-red ray that has been installed to reduce the sometimes haphazard business of timing races down to an exact science. Announcement was made this week that all taxes on admission tickets — previously something of a nuisance — will be absorbed by the track during the Hawthorne meeting. The change in policy will make the admission charge to the grandstand .00 and admission to the clubhouse a flat .00. »


Persistent Link: https://drf.uky.edu/catalog/1930s/drf1934072001/drf1934072001_1_7
Local Identifier: drf1934072001_1_7
Library of Congress Record: https://lccn.loc.gov/unk82075800