Preakness 2025: After 2 no-contests, Pimlico replaces gate
Baltimore
The Pimlico starting gate that sputtered and caused no-contests twice last week was replaced ahead of Saturday’s running of Preakness 2025.
The gate that has been used for three years at nearby Laurel Park was brought over Tuesday and put in use starting Thursday.
“We had a couple gate malfunctions with the Pimlico gate, which has been fine for 20 or 30 years,” 1/ST Racing executive vice president Mike Rogers said Friday. “Maybe because it was sitting for so long, there might have been some wet electrical nodes, so we did replace all of that. But I wasn’t comfortable, because it wasn’t battle-tested. So I figured let’s bring the Laurel gate over, which we know has been battle-tested for three years.”
At first the Laurel gate was going to be a standby that only would have been deployed if the Pimlico gate failed again.
“I’m sure that Pimlico gate is fine,” Rogers said. “The vendor came over and replace everything, but I didn’t want to take the risk on a day like this. If it had been maybe a few days or not (the short meet) at Pimlico, I might have said OK, let’s go for it, but I didn’t want to take that risk.”
No-contests were declared for the meet opener last Friday and the second race last Saturday when the doors of extant Pimlico gate staggered open at different times for different post positions. Since the resumption of racing Thursday, the Laurel gate has been used without incident. It did need a facelift.
“Our maintenance guys, I think they were dreading the fact,” Rogers said. “The sign on top of it, as you can imagine, it’s on there fairly solidly. So they had to remove that and put it on the Laurel gate. But I have to say our maintenance guys were like, ‘Hey, Mike. It’s your call. Whatever you’re comfortable with, we’re down with whatever you want.’ They didn’t make me feel anything, but I knew I was putting a large job on them in a short period of time.”
Rogers said any visual difference between the two gates was not obvious to him, but he thought starter Bruce Wagner might see the nuances because of his expertise in the how gates are built.
“He’s probably one of the best starters in the country. I mean he’s excellent,” Rogers said. “But also, he actually works on gates. They bring gates from other jurisdictions to him. That’s why I had the utmost confidence in him.”
Rogers said Pimlico already had a backup gate on site, but it had not been used recently. He did not want to use that for the Preakness when it had been sitting around for so long.
“I didn’t want to use that one,” Rogers said. “I was comfortable using Laurel’s.”