Question of the Day - 23 May 2023

Both of these questions were submitted in response to the recent QoD on the Churchill Downs and Little Caesar's standalone race and sports books. 

The answer to the first is yes, there were three thoroughbred race tracks (and a dog track) in Las Vegas history.

The first, from the early 1950s, was on the north end of the Strip behind the Thunderbird hotel-casino. The course, called Las Vegas Park, was accessible solely via a narrow gravel road called Las Vegas Park Way, which ran from Paradise Road to the track. But it was less a horse-racing business than a scheme to defraud investors; the promoter raised millions of other people's money and only some of it was spent on the track, not nearly enough to support operations. Las Vegas Park did manage to open in 1953, but due to a cascading series of failures, the track closed six weeks -- 13 race days -- after it opened. A half-million in investor funds went missing, the owners were charged with embezzlement, and the track sat there unused for 10 years until one of the original investors made a stab at resurrecting it.

That was Joe Wells, who had ownership points in the Thunderbird; he was also the father of Dawn Wells, who played the character Maryanne on "Gillligan’s Island."

That second iteration was called Thunderbird Downs. A five-eighths-mile track for thoroughbred and quarter-horse racing, it opened in 1963 and managed to survive for almost three years. Wells quickly sold out his interest, after which Thunderbird Downs was an almost continuous failure, closing after several ownership changes, with all the new owners less and less capitalized and successful.

Finally, Las Vegas Downs opened in early 1981 on Racetrack Road, today a major north-south thoroughfare in Henderson. It, too, was doomed from the beginning. From inception to opening took 12 long years and it appeared that the outer horse-racing track was just a front for the inside dog-racing course. When the horses stopped racing almost immediately, the dog track ran afoul of the racing laws in place at that time. So the laws were changed. Then, the owners tried to raise capital to build a casino-resort around the track, but that never got off the ground. In the end, horse racing lasted barely a month, the greyhounds made it for almost two years, the city foreclosed on the property, and within a matter of months after closing in 1983, the Downs was overgrown and rotting. It was finally replaced with a residential subdivision, starting in the early '90s,  

As for Gary Austin's Sportsbook, we told that story in a QoD almost exactly four years ago. Read it here.