Breeders' Cup Forum: Corgis, T-Rexes, And Kids, Oh My

Breeders' Cup Forum: Corgis, T-Rexes, And Kids, Oh My originally appeared on Paulick Report.

Phil Ziegler grew up on New York's Long Island and spent many a weekend going to the races at Belmont Park and Aqueduct with his father. Fifty years later as president of Emerald Downs in Auburn, Wash., Ziegler still seems to be a kid at heart, creating zany events that draw crowds and have given the track a national profile.

Throughout the summer horse racing meet that runs from late April into early September, the Seattle-area track stages a number of unique promotions, including grandparent races, kid races, Corgi races and T-Rex races, where contestants from around the country don dinosaur costumes and run down the stretch of the dirt track to compete for a "world championship" trophy. Another popular event is the Indian Relay races that are part of the heritage of the track's owner, the Muckleshoot Tribe. Videos of the events are distributed to television networks and they've been picked up by local news outlets from New York to Los Angeles.

The popular Corgi World Championships and the T-Rex races are televised on ESPN2's annual The Ocho lineup alongside World Dog Surfing Championships, Roofball and other offbeat sporting events. This year's Ocho lineup is July 31, with T-Rex and Corgi races broadcast between 11 p.m. and midnight ET.

There is a method to Ziegler's madness. He's not just trying to attract attention to Emerald Downs. The events boost the track's bottom line, but Ziegler is also looking for ways to introduce horse racing to the next generation of fans.

Ziegler, who was named Emerald Downs president in 2015, has spent more time marketing casinos than racetracks, serving as the marketing director for the Muckleshoot Casino for 10 years just down the road from Emerald Downs. He was assistant GM and marketing director at New Mexico's Zia Park for a spell and was marketing director for a Louisiana casino before returning to the Pacific Northwest 10 years ago.

Ziegler was interviewed by Paulick Report publisher Ray Paulick at Emerald Downs during the July 13 Corgi World Championships.

What does Emerald Downs get out of these promotions, like the Corgi races, the T-Rex and Grandparents races?

When videos go viral like that, the track gets a lot of recognition. We’re starting to see people coming into town for these events because they see the stuff on social media, and we're able to get some money from Auburn tourism (the city has a committee known as Explore Auburn). You may see us on the news, internationally and nationally, and when some people watch these T-Rex races, we hear from many folks that they want to do it. So now people start flying into town. We call it a world championship. I mean, it's kind of tongue-in-cheek fun, but we saw people coming from a dozen different states and provinces this year to be in this race. Last year there was one lady from California, a teacher, who came up all by herself, wanted to be in the race. So it's actually bringing people, not just to the track, but to the town. And, of course, we just get a kick out of all the attention that it gets as well. And we also are able to sell sponsorships. 

Can you measure how many first-time visitors to Emerald Downs come back?

It's hard to give an answer to that. Some may come back a few times a year. Maybe they come once a year, then they'll come twice a year. Maybe they'll come three times a year. Maybe they only come on the big promotions. It's not unlike people that go to a store on Black Friday, right? Do they go back to that store? Well, if they have a good experience, and that's the day everybody's there. Some of them may not, but others definitely do. And maybe somebody looks at it and says, “Hey, that was a lot of fun.” And maybe there's another promotion that we're doing that will also interest them to bring them back.

How do you reach the local market?

Mostly social media. It's Facebook boosting, and we recently started doing TikTok. It's all the videos that people share. There's nothing better than that. It used to be word of mouth, right? Used to be the best promotion you could have in marketing is people telling their friends, telling their friends, telling their friends. Well, now that happens on social media, with people sharing posts so they come out here. You have a kids race with 200 kids, and 200 parents taking those videos and posting them to all their friends. And it looks like fun. That just starts to snowball, and more people want to come out. And we do Groupons (a website and app that offers discounts on good, services and experiences). We do some advertising. We're on some cable channels. But traditional marketing and advertising? A lot less these days compared to all the other stuff.

Long term, I assume the goal is to get people interested in horse racing and betting, but short term they are spending money through parking, admissions, and food and beverages. How important is that part of your revenue?

Very important. You know, we don't have a casino here. We don't have supplemental income from the state. We have to make it on our own with horse racing. And primarily, yes, every dollar counts, and it's great when people bet on us from out of state, and we advertise our stakes races in the Daily Racing Form. But the primary thing is to get people to the racetrack, and they're going to spend money, they're going to bet, they're going to buy drinks. They're going to buy the kids ice cream and the whole thing, and they're going to pay to get in.

When you're a track like us, every dollar, literally, counts, and you try to do the best you can with it. But when you look at revenue, and for people that don't know – and a lot of people may not know – when we receive a bet made from out of state on one of our races, we might get anywhere from three to five percent. From that, you’ve got to give a portion to purses, a portion goes to the state of Washington. So maybe on a $200 bet, we might be making $5 or $6. Well, you sell one beer to somebody here that costs $10 and you're making more than that, or at least the equivalent of it. So I say for every single beer you sell, it's equivalent to somebody betting two-hundred bucks from somewhere else – just to put it in perspective.

You don’t have a casino at the track, but there are a lot of casinos in the state. What’s the competitive landscape like?

Well, we we're very lucky that the Muckleshoot tribe owns and operates this track, and the sister property, the Muckleshoot Casino, is right up the road, and there's great synergy there. And I think it's great for people to come to town. A lot of folks come to the track, go to the casino and they have a brand new hotel now, too. The tribe supports us. They do enhance purses, something they’ve been doing since 2004. They’ve been giving over a million dollars a year to purses. So that's been very critical for this industry, for the horsemen to survive on the purses that we have, the fact that they're supplementing them.

But as far as the landscape, as these casinos have gotten bigger, and the share of the gaming revenue for horse racing goes down, and now you have sports betting, you have to be more creative on ways to attract people to the racetrack to compete against that other stuff. It’s easy to sit here and complain, “Well, that's no fair. They’re doing this and they’re doing that.” If you own an Italian restaurant in town, and somebody else opens up an Italian restaurant, your food needs to be better than theirs, right? Or you better figure out a way to get people in the door to keep your customers.

Racing in Northern California has ended, Portland Meadows has been closed for years and there’s not much racing in Oregon. Things are not looking good up the road at Hastings Park in Vancouver. Are you benefiting from any of this?

Certainly, when you look at the Racing Form this year and you see our field size is up, and you see a lot of Northern California horses that are here, we've probably seen more horses with Golden Gate and even Santa Anita on their past performances than we have in the previous 10 years that I've been here. A lot of those horses were just looking for a place to go. Some went south, and some came up this way. We kind of have a little circuit between us and Turf Paradise. Quite a few trainers will do those two tracks to cover their whole year You hate to see any racetrack close, but, yes, we picked up maybe a horse a race basically, from the field size and the extra horse population here.

One of the biggest complaints of horseplayers everywhere is the impact of CAW bettors. What is the policy at Emerald Downs on computer assisted wagering?

Well, our feeling is you can't do much about it except let the public know as much as you can. So we developed, starting last year, something called the “dynamic morning line.” The morning line is what we think the odds are going to be, but we felt the morning line doesn't have to stay static. So we look at all the will pays, put it into calculations, and then give people what we call our “dynamic morning line.” It's amazing how accurate it is. So at least if you look up on our screen and see an 8-1 shot (on the regular morning line), and the dynamic morning line says 2-1, and it's currently sitting at 6-1, we're telling you that horse is probably going to close at around 2-1, so when it happens, the horse players are not surprised by it. That kind of transparency at least lets people know and gives the proper information as to the betting trends and the will pays.

I wasn't the one that came up with this, but somebody called those pick threes and doubles and pick fours a “closed market.” All the bets are in, so you can look at the will pays and see. Now, anybody can look at will pays and kind of figure that out themselves, but we try to put it right up there on the screen to show what we think the win odds are going to be. I think that's the best you can do.

You got some media attention earlier this year when you said the fees paid to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority are jeopardizing the future of the track. Has there been any progress with HISA on that?

We've been working with them. They're new. They have a different assessment method that takes purses out of the equation and just treats every starter the same here in a $9,000 race as a track with a $100,000 race. There's a lot of things that have to play out over the next couple of years; maybe they'll rethink that. We've been trying to work with them. I know they're working on trying to get funding for their operations. I can't speak on their behalf, obviously, but I'm confident we'll figure out a way through this, at least short term to maybe hopefully get a longer term answer.

If a track decides to opt out of HISA – and a lot of tracks have said we're not going to be in it – I think that's a problem. No. 1, you have five or six states that have not just opted out – they're just not doing it. If this thing was supposed to be about nationwide standards and safety, the more states that are opting out of this means you still have this divide. In fact, HISA themselves say this is what our tracks have, and this what the non-HISA tracks have (safety statistics). Well, the intent was to get everybody on board. And the other thing it does is tracks like Grants Pass and Wyoming Downs used to sell their signal out of state. It didn't do a lot of handle, but it was something. And it was a few bucks for our horsemen from our players betting on it, and a few bucks for the horsemen there. But because the fees outweighed what they were making on selling, you force some of these tracks to not sell their signal, which hurts everybody. So I think there's got to be a better solution. I really like a lot of the rules and a lot of the changes; it's great for the safety and everything else, but the funding of it is causing some unintended consequences.

You mentioned the Muckleshoots. Do they have a long-term commitment to horse racing at Emerald Downs?

They’ve been supporting purses since 2004 – over $1 million a year. I'd consider that pretty long term. They own and operate the track. They're very happy with it. We have the Indian Relay racing, which is a big cultural weekend for them and a popular event. I think they're also interested in the fairness of revenue, and they can't be the only ones propping it up in the state. They need help, like we need help, but we wouldn't be here without them. They do an amazing job for us.

What’s the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for the track?

The biggest opportunity is the people that come here. I see there's always this debate about how the horsemen put on the show, and they do, and how the track puts on the show, and we do, but we wouldn't be here, and nothing would be here if you didn't have racing fans, and you didn't have the people supporting it, the bettors, and the people that come to the racetrack and bring their kids and spend the money and all that. And that keeps us going. And we found other ways of using the property for other purposes and make some money on banquets and renting out parts of the parking lots for semis to park there and things like that.

The biggest challenge is that other states offer so much enhancement to purses that it becomes tougher to compete while expenses are going up. Longacres (which closed in 1991) used to run for $10 million a year, and here we are all these years later, running for $7 million. So I think when you do the math and you say, collectively, what it's costing the owners, and this is what the purses are, it doesn't really add up. So we need to figure out a way in the future. That's the challenge, to try to bridge that gap so that it can support itself. I don't know what that answer is, but that's the big challenge

This story was originally reported by Paulick Report on Jul 23, 2025, where it first appeared.

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