Illinois Harness
Horsemen's Association
Illinois Harness
Horsemen's Association
Mike Paradise
Recent Stories
At long last the Open trot has returned to Hawthorne. It’s been more than a month since the top overnight event for trotting horses has embellished the Illinois Standardbred circuit and it comes with one more weekend to go before the curtains comes down on the Chicago area racetrack, as far as harness racing is concerned.
Perry Smith’s Round Here Buzz, fresh off ending the stranglehold of Hawthorne’s Open event for the last two months by Australian bred pacers, faces a new Down Under threat Saturday evening.
The Open Pace returns to Hawthorne on Sunday afternoon after a two-week hiatus due to an insufficient number of entries. That wasn’t the case this time around has nine horses, five of them Australian breds, were submitted for the sixth race feature.
Hawthorne’s harness racing meeting is entering its homestretch with only a trio of weekends left. Its race office has decided to wrap the session with an additional pop-up series that concludes on the track’s closing night.
Often the road to a successful showing in a major race isn’t a smooth one and you can add the name of Fox Valley Tessa, the 2023 Plum Peachy champion to that list. In fact, it was nip and tuck that the 3-year-old ICF filly would even make Hawthorne’s Night of Champions Final.
When a horse dominates a division like Whiskey Lou did in the 2023 ICF trotting filly class when she won 13 of 14 starts, including the Beulah Dygert final on Hawthorne’s Night of Champions, often overlooked is what any of her rivals did.
Hawthorne Open Pace returns Sunday night but with an unusual look. It’s a six-horse field and only one horse in it was not bred in Australia and competed on the other side of the globe before coming to the United States.
There’s a new “Top Gun” in the Illinois trotting ranks and at one time in 2023 he had a 10-race losing streak and didn’t get a check in most of those disappointing starts.
With an extremely cold weather forecast on the horizon, Hawthorne has cancelled Sunday’s racing program and changed Saturday’s 14-race card to an earlier 5:30 (Central time) first post time.
All winning streaks eventually end but the question always remains: When? Is Sunday the night the recent dominance in Hawthorne’s filly and mare Open Pace or its top-level trot event comes to a close?
The last of Hawthorne’s Jingle Bell series events will wrap up Saturday evening with another Steve Searle trained trotter looking for a series sweep.
The adage “There’s No Place Like Home” was popularized by Dorothy (Judy Garland) in the old 1939 Classic movie The Wizard of Oz. Even today the admired phase fits numerous situations, and that includes horse racing.