Horse racing in Maryland will soon get a $400 million infusion of public funds, and officials hope efforts to renovate Pimlico Race Course will coincide with a resurgence of its marquee event, the Preakness Stakes. Next year’s race, the 150th installment, will be preceded by a festival aimed at elevating the storied event’s status and bringing more out-of-towners to the Baltimore region.
Specifics are few. But, with an eye toward weekslong efforts in Louisville, Kentucky, to annually promote the Kentucky Derby, organizers are seeking to generate more interest in the second jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown.
“What we’re trying to do is bring back some of the tradition that existed in the past, while maybe cultivating some new ideas and some new thoughts on what a Preakness festival concept would look like,” Terry Hasseltine, president of the Sport and Entertainment Corporation of Maryland, a nonprofit, said in an interview Wednesday.
The Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority, which was formed last year, agreed during a board meeting Monday to partner with the nonprofit sports corporation on the Preakness festival for next year’s event and beyond.
Hasseltine, who previously worked as the deputy executive director of the Kentucky Sports Authority, said the festival will be a “series of events” that grows larger in coming years. Ideally, he said, it would encourage travelers to make a “several-day visitation” to Baltimore.
“We’re trying to create something that is, I wouldn’t say it’s an exact mirror of the Derby Festival,” he said, “but creates something that is well-thought-out, well-delivered and creates people putting the Preakness on that travel bucket list.”
The festival will be anchored by a large spectacle, such as a concert, a fireworks display or a drone show. In Louisville, a massive fireworks show, which the Kentucky Derby Festival bills as the nation’s largest such annual event, takes place two weeks before the Derby.
“It can’t be a cutting of a ribbon,” Hasseltine said of the Baltimore festival’s kickoff. “It’s got to be something that says, we’re putting our foot down, this is the start of Preakness celebration 150.”
Activities ahead of next year’s Preakness will be funded by a “public-private consortium that has to be put together,” Hasseltine said.
Initial plans are focused on next year’s race, but the events could provide a “template” for an annual festival, racing authority Chair Greg Cross said.
“If we do it right, every year will get better and better,” he said.
In decades past, the week before the Preakness was full of regional and local events: hot air balloon races, daily block parties, talent shows, and several gatherings and festivals. (Six days before the 1993 Preakness, one of the many musical acts playing at the free “Fells Point Preakness Festival” was a yet-to-be-fully-discovered Dave Matthews Band.)
And although Preakness weekend hosts concerts at Pimlico each year, the long-running parade and other events outside the track began to wane in the 2010s.
An event resurgence would complement public investment in horse racing, as roughly $400 million in state funds will be used in the coming years to rebuild Pimlico — in desperate need of repair — and a training center elsewhere in the state. The racing authority has yet to decide where that site will be. As part of the plan, Anne Arundel County’s Laurel Park will host the 2026 Preakness, but cease to exist as a racetrack once the renovated Pimlico opens in 2027.
Under the original plan, some of the barns on Pimlico’s backstretch, as well the decrepit Old Grandstand, which has been closed for years because of safety concerns, would be demolished before the 2025 Preakness.
That has been revised, however. While the barns will be destroyed as envisioned, the grandstand will stay standing until after next year’s Preakness, when the bulk of demolition will occur. Authorities found that it would be costly to destroy the grandstand while keeping the clubhouse intact.
“We’ll do the demolition all at one time, after Preakness 150 next May,” Gary McGuigan, the Maryland Stadium Authority’s executive vice president for Capital Projects Development, said earlier this month.
Cross said, however, that he “100%” expects a rebuilt Pimlico to host the Preakness in 2027, as scheduled.
Baltimore design firm Ayers Saint Gross has been contracted by the stadium authority as the Pimlico project’s architect with assistance from Populous. Canopy Team, a Baltimore-based planning, design and development firm led by former Oriole Park design and planning director Janet Marie Smith, is also providing services.
The Stronach Group, which operates racing in the state and formerly owned Pimlico, transferred the racetrack to the state’s racing authority July 1. A nonprofit, which will be created by the state this year and is expected to be named the Maryland Jockey Club, will take over racing operations from The Stronach Group on Jan. 1.
While Stronach will run the Preakness in 2025 and 2026, that nonprofit will operate the Preakness beginning in 2027, paying Stronach roughly $5 million annually for the rights to the race.
The Preakness has historically been a moneymaker for the racing industry, but in recent years, it has operated in the red. A new operator will hope to increase attendance and revenues.
“We want to make Preakness great again,” Marc Broady, executive director of the racing authority, said earlier this year.
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As recently as 2019, an announced crowd of more than 180,000 attended Preakness events on Friday and Saturday. But Stronach has said in recent years that it made an “intentional choice to reduce the footprint,” and this year’s two-day event hosted 63,423.
Those numbers are expected to increase at a revamped Pimlico.
One other consideration Hasseltine brought up was the potential impact that a scheduling shuffle could have on buzz around the Preakness. There are no current plans to make a change to the Triple Crown schedule, but some fans and industry leaders have suggested moving the Preakness — which takes place two weeks after the Derby — later into the year, allowing three or four weeks between races.
Doing so would give horses more time to rest between the premier events. But it would also, Hasseltine hypothesized, provide more time for celebrity attendees of the Derby to attend the Preakness.
