Steeplechase Revival

Guelph and jockey Xavier (Chev) Aizpuru at Fair Hill last month.

Image: Tod Marks

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Fair Hill racetrack is a splendidly anachronistic steeplechase course in the soft, rolling border country just below the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland. It remains today as William du Pont Jr. built it during the Depression: about as much like a rural British track as you can get in the United States.

Yet steeplechasing, while still small, is enjoying a renaissance at a time when flat racing struggles with fewer horses and lagging profits.

That might have surprised Willie du Pont, as horsemen called him, who was one of those unpretentious country squires with millions in his khaki trousers and a passion for foxhunting, timber races, and steeplechases. As a great-grandson of a founder of the chemical behemoth DuPont, he had plenty of spare time to indulge his fancies.

Du Pont put the track—patterned after the Aintree Racecourse in England—on about 7,000 acres of some of the oldest settled land in America. He invited his horsey friends, the landed gentry, and the farmers and yeomen from the countryside on which he foxhunted to the first Fair Hill Race meet in 1934. He died on New Year's Eve 1965, and the state of Maryland bought the part of the estate south of the Mason-Dixon. But Fair Hill still holds race meetings every spring. Indeed, it's the only steeplechase meet in America that offers pari-mutuel betting.

In the old days, bookmakers stood in front of the grandstand, scribbling odds on slates with chalk. Today, betting windows look out from a long, low shed that resembles a converted chicken coop. Not that the conservative, countrified crowd that comes to Fair Hill bets much.

The 14,000 folks who showed up this year—perhaps the largest one-day audience ever to witness a sporting event in Cecil County—wagered just $173,434 on eight races. Forty miles farther south, at Pimlico in Baltimore, about half as many jaded racing fans put $1.8 million on 10 races. Still, wagering at Pimlico fell 16.5 percent this spring from last year. Nationally, the pari-mutuel handle declined more than 3 percent.

Fair Hill is the annual spring finale of the National Steeplechase Association, which oversees 30 race meetings in 12 states, from March through November. The events attract about a million fans, offer more than $4 million in prize money and raise millions more for charity.

Steeplechase Times publisher Joe Clancy attributes at least part of the interest to tradition. "On some level, each race meet is a major community event," he says. "Maybe it's because people don't get a chance to go outside enough. They're definitely not coming just for the horses."

Fair Hill is like a college football tailgate. Willie du Pont's gentrified manor folk still come out with their yeomen retainers, but every year suburbia creeps ever closer from Wilmington, Delaware, and southern Pennsylvania.

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