Racing In Maryland

JUST WHEN Maryland horse racing was starting to gain some momentum, internal squabbles threaten great harm to an already shaky industry. There won't be any monetary help from Annapolis until the racing community gets its act together. Key state lawmakers already have made that abundantly clear.A long history of bitterness between harness and thoroughbred interests lies behind the current discord on splitting simulcast revenues. Not only are Rosecroft (the harness track owned by harness horsemen)

ON THEIR SECOND TRY, backers of slot-machine gambling won voter approval in Charles Town, W. Va., for electronic one-armed bandits at the local race track. Out-of-state owners threatened to shut down the small track otherwise. That threat didn't work two years ago, but it did this time, thanks to a promised $16 million renovation.Officials at Maryland's tracks immediately expressed deep concern. With slot machines at Delaware tracks already boosting racing purses dramatically, Maryland racing leaders fear a continuing squeeze on local tracks from new gambling in neighboring states.

When Magna Entertainment Corp., majority owner of the Maryland Jockey Club, announced earlier this month that it lost $50.3 million in the third quarter of this year, Jim McAlpine, Magna president and chief executive officer, said the company had begun a sweeping review, with the intention of dramatically cutting costs and possibly selling property. During a visit to Maryland last week, McAlpine said the review, conducted by an executive management committee, was "just good business - to periodically step back and ask: `Are we doing everything we should be doing?

At post time, there was still a glimmer of hope. OK, maybe not a glimmer, more like a vague, desperate hope that Maryland horse racing's future might somehow be salvaged, maybe even secured. "I don't want to say we're on pins and needles, but this meet does start in limbo," Maryland Jockey Club CEO Lou Raffetto said yesterday. "We're all waiting. I don't like to think about the alternative because it scares me what that means to us," he said. Opening Day of Pimlico's spring meet was a weird one, because as it wore on, it drew closer to what everyone figured was a foregone conclusion: The state's slot machine bill that was going to be racing's salvation - not to mention education's and taxation's salvation - was dying, if not already DOA. Walking through the barns behind the grandstand at Pimlico yesterday, you'd wave to grooms and riders and say, casually: "How's it going?"

WHEN THE MAYOR of Baltimore stands in front of the greatest painting of a thoroughbred horse, as Martin O'Malley did yesterday to kick off Triple Crown season, and issues a warning about the gloomy future of horse racing in Maryland, something's up. Welcome to the home of the Preakness ... for now. That, essentially, was the message. Politicians love to whistle Dixie, but not this time, not in front of the majestic Whistlejacket, the horse in the glorious painting by George Stubbs that currently graces the walls of the Walters Art Museum.

The story of thoroughbred horse racing in Maryland begins in Colonial America and hurtles through the decades with a force of star power that no state outside Kentucky can match. George Washington bet here. Man O' War learned to race here. Triple Crown champions such as Citation and Secretariat won here. Legends such as Native Dancer and Kelso are buried here. A new chapter in the tale is written every year with the running of the Preakness, the second jewel of the Triple Crown, set for Saturday at Pimlico Race Course.

Did you know there once were two speedways in Carroll County?Didyou know Maryland has had nearly oval 30 tracks, but only two remain?One man knows all this and more, and he lives in South Carroll. When someone wants information about area auto racing from the past, they call Larry Jendras.Jendras, a draftsman for Bechtel Corp. in Gaithersburg, has perhaps the largest collection of racing photos, programs and newspaper clippings in Maryland.He has more than 50 albums crammed with racing photos from the early days, including memorabilia from speedways that most of us never knew existed.

Jamie V. Salazar heard the news on the radio yesterday morning: The Bowie Training Center where he lives and works could close its gates in May. "I don't know where we would go," Salazar said. "People are worried. We want to stay here. Where would we live?" Salazar has been a groom at Bowie for about eight years. But as he sat with his back against a stable wall alongside five other grooms, all he could do was shake his head. He doesn't have a plan; he doesn't know where he would go. And neither, he said, do the 200 or so workers who live at Bowie and care for the horses.

LAUREL -- Before racing in Maryland became a year-round grind in the mid-1970s, Delaware Park was considered on a par with Pimlico and Laurel race courses. Summer meetings at Delaware were a pleasant diversion for horsemen from around ** the country, but especially those from Maryland.The Delaware Handicap, the track's highlight, was also a top-class race, a Grade I event. But as racing proliferated in the East, the track fell on hard times, and the Delaware Handicap, now a Grade II, also lost some of its luster.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Sitting side by side in a rare display of unity, Joseph A. De Francis and Jeffrey P. Jacobs shoved aside past differences yesterday and delivered the forecast for horse racing in Virginia: bleak and cloudy this year, with sunshine and improving fortunes in the future.For 1999 at the beleaguered Colonial Downs racetrack, they proposed a 25-day thoroughbred meet Sept. 5 to Oct. 10 and no harness meet. Harness racing could return in 2000 after a year of cost cutting and improved management, they said.