Ellis Park: Maker, Lynch are loaded for Kentucky Downs previews

For trainers Mike Maker and Brian Lynch, Kentucky Downs Preview Weekend at Ellis Park is exactly what the name implies: the opportunity to get horses to Kentucky Downs and America’s largest stakes purses four and five weeks later.

“Every single one of them,” said Maker, who is Kentucky Downs’ all-time leader in wins, purse earnings, starts, seconds, thirds and meet titles. He has nine horses entered in five of this weekend’s seven turf stakes.

“We are focused on trying to get them all eligible to get into those races,” said Lynch, who has six horses entered in three of the Ellis stakes. “Kentucky Downs can make a trainer’s summer or make the whole year. This program at Ellis has stopped me from going to Saratoga.”

The event launched in 2018 as Kentucky Downs Preview Day, starting as a one-day event with four $100,000 stakes, of which $25,000 was restricted to Kentucky-breds. Patterned after the Breeders’ Cup’s win-and-you’re-in program, horses who win a review race are guaranteed a fees-paid spot in the corresponding race at Kentucky Downs in Franklin.

The preview series was the brainchild of Ellis Park racing secretary Dan Bork and came to fruition via a collaboration with Kentucky Downs, the Kentucky Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association and the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission. The stakes were funded out of purse money generated at Kentucky Downs and transferred to Ellis Park under a unique arrangement with Kentucky Downs; the Kentucky HBPA, which represents owners and trainers at both Kentucky Downs and Ellis Park; and the racing commission, which must approve allotments of Kentucky Thoroughbred Development Fund monies.

Preview day morphed into preview weekend with the expansion to seven races in 2021. Last year the purses increased to a minimum of $200,000, including KTDF,  to $300,000 for the Grade 3 Pucker Cup for 3-year-old fillies, which Ellis Park’s corporate owner Churchill Downs Inc. moved from defunct Arlington Park.

This year, the minimum purse is $250,000, with Sunday’s Kentucky Downs Preview Turf now $300,000 and the Pucker Up $400,000, all including KTDF money.

“I don’t know anything comparable in America, maybe the world, where one track provides the funding to a track with different ownership to such an extent as Kentucky Downs does for Ellis Park and other tracks in the state,” Kentucky HBPA president Rick Hiles said. “We’re proud to have embraced the concept from the beginning. It certainly has done well by Ellis Park horsemen, and it provides the summer’s best weekend of racing in the Midwest. Kentucky Downs Preview Weekend absolutely keeps horses in Kentucky for the summer.”