ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Friday, May 3, 1996                    TAG: 9605030032
SECTION: SPORTS                   PAGE: B-5  EDITION: METRO 
COLUMN: Jack Bogaczyk
SOURCE: JACK BOGACZYK

THEY'RE OFF AND RUNNING TO BET IN VA.

There's something different about Saturday's 122nd Kentucky Derby. It's the first time wagering on the Run for the Roses will be legal at a pari-mutuel site in Virginia.

Derby Day will be the biggest in the short history of what is listed in the phone directory as the Colonial Downs Wagering Facility, which is the commonwealth's first off-track betting outlet, on Military Highway in Chesapeake.

Chesapeake OTB, which was converted from 12,000 feet of a vacated supermarket at a cost of about $1 million, has a capacity of 650, but more than 1,500 patrons have ponied up to the windows on some Saturdays. Since its February opening, Chesapeake OTB has been nothing but a success with its simulcasts from up to 15 tracks.

The handle to date is approaching $9 million. What has surprised the operators of Colonial Downs, the state's first pari-mutuel track, is the per-capita wagering. Most OTB facilities in virgin territory are accompanied by a wait-and-see attitude among bettors. Chesapeake OTB is averaging about $130 wagered per customer.

``We're above projections,'' said Brett Stansley, executive vice president of Colonial Downs and spokesman for Ohio-based Stansley Racing Corp., which was awarded the state's first license by the Virginia Racing Commission. ``The per-capita number has increased since our opening.''

Colonial Downs is expected to open in New Kent County between Richmond and Williamsburg in July 1997. That's almost nine years after Virginia voters, by 56 percent to 44 percent, approved pari-mutuel wagering in a statewide referendum. In those years, there were more than a few days when state horse racing interests felt like the rest of the 1973 Belmont Stakes field trying to catch Secretariat, the commonwealth's most famous racing native.

In conjunction with the track license, Colonial Downs was granted permission to open up to six OTB sites in the state. A second is expected to open within two months, on the basement floor of a Richmond hotel. Stansley said his group ``feels state demographics warrant 12 to 15,'' but it's going to be a long stretch run.

State law requires local referendums to approve pari-mutuel wagering. Certainly, the Roanoke Valley, as the state's largest population center south of the Washington suburbs and west of Richmond, would make sense as an OTB location.

Then, maybe not. When the state referendum votes on pari-mutuel wagering were counted in 1988, the for-against map swung on an axis that basically divided the state at Charlottesville. One locality west of Nelson County voted for the horses. In the City of Roanoke, the vote was 15,194 for and 15,044 against.

It won by a nose.

The hope among horseplayers in this part of the state is that the anti-gambling forces have softened, as they did between the 1978 defeat of pari-mutuel wagering and its passage a decade later.

Still, it's a long stretch run, and, sadly, it doesn't figure to be any time soon when Western Virginians won't find their closest horseplaying possibility is struggling Charles Town in a neighboring state's panhandle.

``There's always a lot of mystery involved with this sort of thing,'' Stansley said of the arrival of pari-mutuel wagering in Virginia - finally. ``You make projections, and we're very close to them, and when that happens, you let out a big sigh of relief. You find there are people interested, but you find you're always trying to educate the public, too.''

So, the patrons who keep filing into the Chesapeake site root home horses on TV screens from Laurel, Pimlico, Oaklawn Park, Keeneland, Santa Anita and Gulfstream. The Stansleys have erected a tent for the Derby to handle an additional 400 patrons for live viewing of the doings at Churchill Downs. It will do the same in two weeks for the Preakness.

The Chesapeake OTB record handle for a single day is $220,000. Stansley expects more than $300,000 to be wagered there Saturday. He also knows that in the Sport of Kings, Virginia has just gotten out of the starting gate.

The business is like horse racing. It's a gamble.

LENGTH: Medium:   79 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  ESPN. Churchill Downs, site of the Kentucky Derby, will 
          be the focus of Virginia's Chesapeake OTB bettors Saturday.
KEYWORDS: HORSE RACING