Dave Tomlin
For the Ruidoso News

Races ready to showcase Come Back Weekend

The 2025 Opening Weekend at Ruidoso Downs brings a deep sense of joy and relief to a community that has spent the past year fighting its way back from the destruction, grief and loss caused by last summer’s fires and floods.

“Seeing those horses run again will symbolize our resilience and determination to rebuild stronger than before,” said Ruidoso Mayor Lynn Crawford.

The feelings are all the sweeter for those who have been seeing, day by day as they drive by the track, how far the Downs had to come to make it back to the starting gate. There were times when it seemed far from a sure bet that this year’s opening day would happen. The 2025 racing season is scheduled to begin May 23 and run through Sept. 1.

To fully grasp how miraculous it is that the track really is back, you need to return to the evening of last July 20 when Johnny and Jana Trotter grimly surveyed their ruined racecourse with Rick Baugh and wondered when, or if, horses would run on it again.

The Trotters own the track. Baugh has been its general manager since 2021. Repeated flooding in the wake of the South Fork and Salt fires last June had already forced the track to close twice briefly for hasty repairs.

But the damage on July 20 was catastrophic. Baugh called it “the blowout.” There would be no third quickie comeback, no rescue of the rest of the racing season, no running of the 2024 All-American Futurity in Ruidoso.

“We were sitting in the suites up on top, and we could see down, and I told Johnny there’s no way,” Baugh said. “The jockeys’ room had over 4 feet of water. The tote board, over 4 feet. There was just so much devastation. The tunnel that goes under the racetrack to the paddock, it was full.”

It was a heartbreaking sight and an emotional moment, Baugh said. The surging, debris-laden Rio Ruidoso had collapsed the culverts at the east end of the track, diverting the toxic river flow into the barn and stable area where 500 workers and more than 1,700 horses lived and worked.

At the upstream end of the track, the main entrance from the highway was heavily damaged. The culverts were intact but clogged shut with silt and debris. The overwhelming volume of water, combined with a torrent of Salt Fire burn scar runoff coming downslope on Highway 70 had turned the infield into a filthy, floating junkyard.

“You name it, we found it,” Baugh said. “There was 100,000 cubic yards of propane tanks, carved bears, everything, just spread out over the infield and the barn area.”

Baugh and the Trotters noticed that the quarter horse  track directly in front of the grandstand was the only undamaged portion of the oval. That would be a key factor in determining the track’s future.

But there wasn’t time on the night of July 20 for long-range planning. Baugh and his bosses had to get the people and animals off the property and out of harm’s way. Then they had to make the tough call, pulling the ripcord on the Ruidoso season.

“It was horrible,” Baugh said. “It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. I knew it would be devastating to all the businesses. Some of them didn’t realize the value of the track to their businesses until we were gone.”

Baugh estimates that every racing season brings $160 million into the regional economy, as horse owners, trainers, bettors and fans buy lodging and meals and patronize the local souvenir, clothing and jewelry shops that line Sudderth Drive in Midtown.

The fires had shut down the village for more than a week in June, and the flooding had scoured its way through town leaving behind collapsed buildings, uprooted trees, giant boulders and great heaps of contaminated dirt. Baugh knew local business owners were already having a hard time figuring out how to survive.

“And now you’re taking the economic engine away and leaving town,” he said. “A lot of these people were my friends. But we had to go.”

Tough as it was to decide to move the rest of the season to Albuquerque, the decision to come back and rebuild for 2025 didn’t even have to be made. It was a foregone conclusion. Baugh said the Trotters’ commitment to Ruidoso was absolute.

“All I can say is everybody owes a debt of gratitude to Johnny and Jana,” Baugh said. “They had numerous offers to move to other cities. I can’t say enough about them. They never second-guessed anything.”

Knowing how much the jump to Albuquerque had hurt, Baugh and the Trotters spruced up the barn area at the track so summer horse sales could be held there. Those events draw upscale horse buyers from all over the country. Baugh urged civic leaders to speed up debris removal efforts so visiting horse fanciers would be convinced Ruidoso hadn’t given up on itself and would be back in business for the 2025 racing season.

Baugh embarked on an exhausting inter-city work schedule, overseeing race operations in Albuquerque from Thursdays through the weekends, then scooting back to the Downs during the week to try to keep repairs moving.

That forced him into collaboration with numerous federal and state agencies. FEMA had most of the available recovery grant money. State homeland security officials were coordinating a lot of the actual work, much of which was performed by the Natural Resource Conservation Service, overseen and authorized on site by state highway supervisors because the grant funds flowed through the New Mexico Department of Transportation.

Presiding over all of this was the Army Corps of Engineers because the Rio Ruidoso, a public waterway, ran right through the infield. The Corps has absolute jurisdiction over any work that affects the volume and direction of the river’s flow, including repairs to the culverts at both ends of the track.

Baugh said the interlocking laws, multi-agency rules, engineering studies and plans, compliance questions and authorizations were maddening, especially since he and the Trotters were nearly powerless to control or speed up the work as the days ticked by.

So they turned their attention to the next big decision that was entirely theirs to make: whether to continue including some thoroughbred races on their race day cards or make Ruidoso Downs an all-quarter horse track. To hear Baugh tell it, this one was not a tough call.

“We are a quarter horse racetrack,” he said. “That’s what we’re known for. So you take what you’re known for and grow it.”

The quarter horse Triple Crown races — the Ruidoso Futurity, the Rainbow Futurity and the All-American Futurity — are all run at Ruidoso Downs.

“Within the quarter horse industry itself, Ruidoso Downs is the Kentucky Derby,” Baugh said. Trotter and Baugh have both held leadership positions in the American Quarter Horse Association, and Trotter was recently inducted into its Hall of Fame.

But not everyone is sure the exclusive focus on quarter horses is the right move for Ruidoso.

“We are so grateful that Ruidoso Downs will be open for the summer, even if it is only quarter horse racing,” said Joni Stettheimer, who owns Indulgence in Midtown with her husband Chris. “We have to start somewhere. We are excited to see what this summer brings for Midtown merchants.”

But the Stettheimers say they and other business owners are worried about the impact on the region’s thoroughbred breeders, who she said must now take their horses out of state for racing and training facilities.

And they think racing fans who favor thoroughbreds will look elsewhere for thrills, significantly reducing the economic benefit of the track to local merchants.

Baugh disagrees on all counts and says he thinks the Stettheimers and their peers will be pleasantly surprised. He predicted quarter horse races would draw the same big crowds, those crowds would be big spenders in the village, and the parimutuel betting handle would actually be greater.

“I get full fields on quarter horse races,” he said. “In thoroughbred races I only get five or six per race.”

There are bigger questions than these around the 2025 racing season. Will the season now opening in Ruidoso also end in Ruidoso? Will local racing fans be able to stand at the rail clutching their betting slips as turf clods spatter their faces from flying hooves in the All-American Futurity this coming September?

“If you love racing, there’s nothing like that feeling,” Baugh said. “And you can’t build this mountain scenery.”

Baugh said recovery workers expanded the river channel and gouged 150,000 cubic yards of earth out of the infield to create a holding basin for extreme flooding that may come with the wetter monsoon predicted for the months ahead. Larger detainment basins are planned just upstream from the track and on Mescalero tribal land to the north.

Racing fans will see various other diversion structures and barriers as they buy their tickets and enter the grandstands. None of these measures are beautiful, but Baugh said nobody comes to the track to admire its infield landscaping.

“Everybody understands it,” Baugh said of the protection barriers. “It serves a purpose. All indicators that we’re getting, from season seat sales to reservations to our millions of followers on Facebook, are that everybody’s excited. The calls and emails that I’ve received and that Johnny and Jana Trotter have received, it’s just been phenomenal.”

Baugh is excited, too.

“We found one of those chainsaw bear carvings six feet tall in all that debris,” Baugh said. “It’s down in the workshop right now. We’re going to put him up out there with a sign on him that says ‘I survived.’”