Monmouth Park, the famed track on the Jersey Shore, launches a 50-day 2025 race meet Saturday.
The track will race two days per week, Saturday and Sunday, until mid-June, when Fridays are added. Even a limited schedule would be difficult to imagine without the $10 million purse subsidy Monmouth annually receives from state government coffers. Last year, a state law passed automatically renewing a $20 million subsidy, split between Thoroughbred and Standardbred purses, through 2029.
Even with funds flowing from the state, Freehold Raceway, the New Jersey harness track, closed this past winter.
The purse subsidy has helped keep afloat the state’s Thoroughbred industry. The number of races Monmouth runs has dropped roughly by half over the last 20 years. The New Jersey foal crop has fallen by about 71 percent during the same period.
Other changes came in 2024. The New Jersey Sports and Exhibition Authority technically owns Monmouth but leases the property to Darby Development. In August, Darby assumed “full custody” of the property after coming to terms on an 85-year lease with the Sports and Exhibition Authority and the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association.
At the start of the 2024 racing season, Monmouth began construction of a new Caesars Sportsbook on the property. The sportsbook had been scheduled to open by the start of the 2025 racing season; now it’s expected to open in July. Darby also has plans to begin a larger construction project in the fourth quarter of this year.
Monmouth purses can’t rival New York and Kentucky, but they’re solid enough. Total purses on Saturday’s 10-race program are more than $450,000 before New Jersey-bred subsidies. Open maiden races are worth $52,500. Monmouth offers a stakes schedule worth about $7.9 million, almost $3 million of which is paid out July 25, $1 million of that in the track’s signature race, the Grade 1 Haskell Stakes. Monmouth does card a stakes race on nearly every weekend program.
Post time on weekends is 12:50 p.m. Eastern, with Friday’s shorter cards beginning at 2 p.m. Fox Sports televises Monmouth races. The Haskell, sponsored by NYRA Bets, is broadcast on NBC.
Monmouth averaged 7.52 starters per race during its 2024 meet – which saw a modest uptick in handle – the same number as 20 years ago. The 311 dirt races last summer averaged fewer than seven starters, the 177 grass races a little more than 8.5 starters. Favorites last year won, turf and dirt, at a 35 percent clip, a modest number by contemporary standards, especially considering dirt field size.
Perennial leading rider Paco Lopez seeks his 12th riding title. Lopez rode 76 winners last season, 10 more than Jairo Rendon’s second-best total. Rendon isn’t riding this meet, leaving Samuel Marin, who had 40 winners in 2024, as Lopez’s leading competition.
Claudio Gonzalez won the last three training titles and is expected to participate at a similar pace this meet, while veteran horseman Joe Orseno was allotted more stalls than in recent seasons. Chad Brown and Todd Pletcher run satellite strings at Monmouth.
Brown, but not Pletcher, has an entrant in the opening-day stakes, the $100,000 Long Branch, a dirt race at one mile and 70 yards for 3-year-olds, the first local step toward the Haskell. Brown cross-entered Lordship, a debut winner over seven furlongs at Tampa, in the Long Branch and the Peter Pan at Aqueduct and is expected to start the horse in New Jersey. Happily Delusional, entered in the same two races, runs in New York.
Pascaline, based at the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland with trainer Arnaud Delacour, is the winner if his one-turn form transfers to two. Pascaline, by Upstart, won the off-turf Laurel Futurity over a one-turn mile last September and came back from a winter break with a solid third going seven furlongs April 19 in the Bay Shore at Aqueduct.
– additional reporting by David Grening
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