Photo Credit: Evergreen Park Facebook page

By Shane Clausing

horse racing

Despite restrictions, Evergreen Park celebrates successful 2020 horse racing season

Aug 25, 2020 | 11:41 AM

Despite uncertainty heading into the 2020 horse racing season, Evergreen Park is celebrating a successful shortened season.

The season, which normally gets underway in June, was pushed back until July 11 to ensure that the venue had all of the proper COVID-19 safety protocols in place to allow for a safe racing season.

Dan Gorman, the General Manager at Evergreen Park, says the season went better than expected.

“We had a great horse racing season this summer and in spite of the fact we had restrictions for numbers and the masking and social distancing, we had really good support. Our horsemen were great in following our safety protocol and so were our fans.

“I’m very please this season went so well.”

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From July 11 until August 23, races at the track took place every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Gorman tells EverythingGP that while the track doesn’t have exact attendance figures from the year, he estimates they averaged between 115-125 fans per race day.

New this year to the horse racing experience at Evergreen Park was the addition of live streaming and online betting.

Gorman says the addition of live streaming and online betting brought lots of new eyeballs to the track.

“The fact that we live streamed our races throughout a lot of the race tracks and betting venues across North America, our handle was about four times (stronger from) what we’ve been in the last number of years, so that was really good.”

While the shortened racing season has come to an end, Gorman said that the track is ready for whatever other curveballs might be thrown at them.

“We are very excited already about next year. We have a new agreement with the government as well that will allow horse racing to be a little more sustainable, but also (allow it) to grow.”

“We are certainly prepared to have all of these safety protocols in place, we are very grateful to keep going.”

At the track this year there were once again no major incidents with horses or jockeys. This means that the track at Evergreen Park hasn’t had a major incident in three years.

This past season, Chuck Stojan from Sexsmith saw his horse Free Thought, add to it’s world record winning streak with 18 straight wins at the summer meet.

Free Thought was bred in California and the winning streak extends back to June 2017.

Any updates regarding the 2021 horse racing season will be made at Evergreen Parks Facebook page.