Kentucky Downs contest shows track's a 'bucket list' destination

Dennis Poppe of suburban Seattle and Tom Pinkowski of Mount Sterling, Ky., will be at the post for Kentucky Downs’ race meet next month as the track’s guests after winning the #LiveAtKyDowns Post Time Contest.

Using the hashtag, participants posted on Twitter and Facebook why they wanted to come to America’s most unique race meet for the first time or why they wanted to go back. There were two grand prizes: a national category for those living more than 200 miles from Kentucky Downs and a regional division for those within that radius. The contest started in late June and ran through July 31, with the winners announced over the weekend.

“We agonized over selecting two winners out of so many passionate and clever posts,” said Amber Norris, Kentucky Downs’ director of marketing. “If this was a horse race, the announcer would have said at the wire, ‘Too close to call.’ Ultimately Dennis and Tom were chosen in very tight finishes for the breadth of their originality and humor — the ones that literally made us LOL.

“We cannot express how appreciative we are of everyone who participated and hope they all come and see us and let us know who they are. We are thrilled with our first foray into such a contest and the enthusiasm and fervor shown by both those who have been here and those with Kentucky Downs on their bucket list. We love our fans, whether on-track and those in the national simulcasting market.”

Both men have been to Kentucky Downs once before, saw the contest as a way to try to return and immersed themselves in pursuit of victory. Both said they followed the competition closely, striving to raise the bar whenever they saw a particularly ingenious post. They were selected by Kentucky Downs’ marketing and publicity team among about 300 entries, with judges exercising their prerogative to consider an entrant’s body of work.

As National winner, Poppe receives airfare, hotel for up to five nights, a $500 betting voucher and will have a race named in his honor. As regional winner, Pinkowski receives a $1,000 voucher, hotel for up to five nights and will have a race named in his honor. The TVG racing network and wagering platform are giving both winners a $250 credit in their TVG accounts.

Poppe is a 65-year-old semi-retired insurance broker and businessman from the Seattle suburb of Issaquah, Wash., who has owned pieces of horses, including West Point Thoroughbreds’ 2014 Kentucky Derby runner-up Commanding Curve. Until the contest, he used his @Poppi71 Twitter account primarily to follow some horse-racing people while rarely posting himself.

“I love Kentucky Downs,” Poppe said. “Everything you guys do is great. I went there a few years ago and I said, ‘This is one of the nicest days I’ve ever spent at a racetrack,’ and I’ve been to Hong Kong, the Europe, to Ascot, most racetracks in the country, Saratoga. And I never had more fun in a day of racing than I did at Kentucky Downs. The reason is that it’s really a pure day there. The horses are close. It wasn’t structured. It just felt so comfortable. I really enjoyed the day.

“So when I saw the contest, I said, ‘I want to go back.’ My wife has a rule that when we travel, ‘there are plenty of places in the world we want to go to, so why would we go to a place twice?’ I knew if I didn’t win this contest, it would be a hard fight for me to get her to go back there twice, if you want the honest answer. And she was just as excited as I was about winning, because she’s very competitive. She said, ‘This is the greatest!’”

The 41-year-old Pinkowski -- whose Twitter name is @TomRubiano in honor of an off-the-track racehorse he owns named Rubiano’s Crown as well as the champion sprinter Rubiano -- works on the barn admissions team at Lexington’s famed Rood & Riddle equine hospital. He and his wife, Deb Lynch-Pinkowski, operate Tom Pinkowski Boarding and Training on their Mount Sterling farm, where five of their own horses reside.

Pinkowski's almost-daily Facebook and Twitter posts featured an array of photos from a trip to Kentucky Downs two years ago (where he won the tickets for Old Friends Day in a Georgia Horse Racing Coalition contest) and touched on everything from handicapping, to the names of drinks at Kentucky Downs’ clubhouse bar, to preparing his shoes and fashion items for the trip to daydreaming — all done with self-deprecating humor. Pinkowski even apologized for a few missed days when a Central Kentucky storm knocked out their power. 

“It was fun,” the former welder said of the contest. “I used to live in New York (near Buffalo). We moved to Kentucky four years ago. I heard of Kentucky Downs being America’s only European-style race course. It was one of those places we had to go to but never got around to it. Then two years ago we did, and now we can go back.”

Pinkowski said he and his wife spent a lot of time brainstorming about posts, finding almost nothing too shameless in pursuit of victory. Even before he donned a pair of silks and goggles, Deb put them on to encourage her husband to create such a post.

“I wasn’t too keen on it,” he said. “She said, ‘You should really do it.’ I said, ‘OK. If I have to embarrass myself to win it, I’ll do it.’”

Pinkowski also crafted a two-part post that showed him strolling away from the KentuckyDowns paddock with the caption, “That swagger you have when you hit an exacta & a trifecta in a row until…” The next day’s post featured a photo of him with a pained expression and the caption: “Until the next few races & your wife's horses start coming in and mine were not even close to hitting the board. I give her a fake smile trying to be happy for her. I'm hoping to win the #LiveAtKyDowns trip to try and show her my sharpened handicapping skills!!”

Said Pinkowski: “I just turned around and she had the camera out. It was one of my least favorite pictures. But for the same reason I had to put it up and embarrass myself.”

Nearing the end of the contest, he posted a photo with a “Kentucky Downs or bust” sign on his car, with seven suitcases ready to load.

Poppe said these were his favorite posts:

“Why Kentucky Downs? BYORS: Bring your own reserved seat!!” (featuring photo of three folding chairs lined up along the rail at Kentucky Downs). "For me, that said it all," he said.

We also liked these:

“Having coffee with Jerry Hollendorfer this morning and mentioned the purse sizes at KY Downs - that he should ship some in to get some of that cash.” (Caption to a photo that he says wasn’t staged with the Hall of Fame trainer’s jaw literally dropping when told about Kentucky Downs’ lucrative purses.)

“It really introduced me to social media,” Poppe said of the contest. “Now I feel compelled every day to post things to other people. It opened up a whole world to me.”