Wyoming’s Sagebrush Circuit Bucks the Trend: Inside the Unlikely Boom in Horse Racing

The original story by Andrew Graham for WyoFile.

An hour before the last card of the Wyoming season, the action at Sweetwater Downs starts on a scale in a cramped backroom. Ron Moorhouse, 72, checks each rider’s weight like a small-town air-traffic controller. He rode for a dozen years himself, scraping by at 110 pounds, nursing an ulcer and crisscrossing the country to make mounts in 13 different states.

“It becomes a lifestyle,” he shrugs, sliding another lead pad onto the metal tray.

Across the hall, 23-year-old Brayan Juarez is quieting the noise in his head, the way he says you have to if you want to hear anything when the gates snap.

“You have to slow your mind when you leave those gates,” he says, helmet off, eyes narrowed on nothing in particular.

There are five races ahead, a season finale in Rock Springs with a grandstand that won’t get more than a third full and burgers going half-off because it’s get-rid-of-everything day. The beer is two bucks. The parking lot is all dust and pickups.

If this sounds like a sport on its last legs, it isn’t — at least not here. While horse racing retreats nationally, Wyoming is loping in the opposite direction. Fifteen years ago, the state didn’t run a single race. This year it strung together more than 50 days from mid-May to late September, hopping from Energy Downs in Gillette through the heat at Wyoming Downs in Evanston and closing at Sweetwater Downs. A fourth oval is rising outside Cheyenne.

“This is one of the few, best, success stories right now in horse racing,” says track owner and operator Eugene Joyce. “No doubt about it.”

The press box is another reminder that this circuit doubles as a proving ground. Twenty-one-year-old announcer Liam Molinaro — whose dad trained runners back in California — is penciling weight changes and rider switches into the program, the kind of detail serious bettors care about and casual fans ignore. He called his first race just last year in Humboldt County, not long before Northern California racing collapsed. Wyoming became a soft landing: same language, different landscape.

Down on the dirt, Star Valley breeder and rancher Rick Hillstead fights back tears as he tries to explain what the sport has meant for his outfit. He used to milk more cows. Then the purses grew and the state’s breeder incentive program kicked in. He had stallions, he had mares, and, crucially, he had a son who wanted in. Over the last decade, state records show Hillstead’s stable earned north of a million dollars in Wyoming breeder awards. The costs to raise and leg up a racehorse are real, he says, but that stream has kept the ranch viable and pulled the family tighter around a livelihood that feels like the Wyoming story told straight.

None of this is happening because a few hundred people show up and bet $20 at the windows. The fuel is humming in thousands of brightly lit terminals spread across more than 40 gaming halls from Cheyenne to Cody. By law they’re not slot machines; they’re “historic horse racing” games that let you wager on anonymized replays of real races. You can handicap the horses on past performance if you want, or mash the button and watch the reels spin. The outcome is determined by an actual result, not random chance, which is how the lawyers make the distinction. And you can’t run those terminals in Wyoming unless you own a live racing track.

The numbers are staggering. The total handle — every dollar pushed through those terminals — topped $2.1 billion in 2024, according to the Legislature’s own analysts. Joyce warns that figure is inflated by churn, the same dollars cycling through multiple spins. He pegs annual revenue around $200 million statewide. Either way, it’s a geyser, and it’s remaking the map. Sweetwater Downs didn’t just materialize; Joyce’s crews once dug demolition-derby shrapnel out of the infield to sculpt the oval. Wyoming operations have been picking up equipment at bargain prices as storied tracks elsewhere shutter, from Southern California to Golden Gate Fields in the East Bay. Thunder Plains, the new track outside Cheyenne, is reportedly outfitting itself with pieces of Golden Gate’s ghost.

That dependence on gaming has made lawmakers twitchy. County and city leaders complain they don’t have the tools to say where these betting halls spring up, and public-health data out of Laramie County found venues clustering in lower-income neighborhoods. Social conservatives in the Freedom Caucus are philosophically uneasy with gambling in any form. A push to hike taxes on the industry stalled this summer, but draft bills are queued up for February to cap the number of terminals a company can operate and require local consent before new facilities open. Operators fire back that their big flagships near Cheyenne and Evanston are aimed squarely at Front Range and Wasatch tourists.

“The point is to attract tourists from out of state and take their money, not our own people’s money,” lobbyist Laurie Urbigkit told a legislative panel.

The moral debate hasn’t slowed the on-track product. On Sept. 8, Sweetwater hosted a race worth $250,000 — the richest purse in Wyoming history. Bigger purses draw sharper horsemen and riders from beyond state lines, which delights fans and tightens margins for locals like Hillstead. That’s the trade: more oxygen in the ecosystem, more predators, too.

Critics say the boom is a subsidy in a cowboy hat, arguing that gambling dollars that could flow to schools and services are propping up a risky sport where horses get hurt and sometimes die. Organizations like Horseracing Wrongs, which tracks fatalities and closures, frame Wyoming’s surge as an island in a shrinking sea. Joyce doesn’t apologize for the model. He calls himself “a horse racing guy, not a gaming guy,” and says his partners, who are gaming pros, have “supercharged the amount of money we can put into horse racing.” He claims to lose roughly $800,000 a season actually staging the meet at Sweetwater, even as the company’s gaming arm prints profits elsewhere. The track, he insists, isn’t a legal fig leaf; it’s the point. He laments how many ovals around the country sit on real estate that’s become more valuable than live racing.

“They’re supposed to be in horse racing,” he says. “But you know they’re making business decisions on this stuff.”

Business decisions are everywhere, even in Rock Springs. The handle at the live meet has averaged about $34,000 a day lately — decent for a small track, irrelevant compared with the glow of the machines. Still, there are true believers. Local regulars Pete Radakovich and Jolene Endres show up armed with a program and their own eyeballs, betting late after they’ve watched the horses in the paddock. He swears he’s net ahead. She laughs and says that’s not why they come. The ritual is the point: the walk-up, the break, the surge into the first turn, the thunder in the lane, the flicker of possibilities that seems to live only in live sport.

Back in the booth, Molinaro eases into his rhythm as the horses load, voice rising and falling like a metronome tied to the pace. On the ground, Juarez is a still line of muscle and nerve in the gate, waiting for the bell. Moorhouse leans near the tunnel, watching his next batch of riders jog past, checking posture and focus with the eye of someone who paid in pounds and pain. Out beyond the clubhouse, a fourth track is taking shape in the prairie east of Cheyenne, its barns and grandstand a bet that Wyoming’s unlikely boom has a few more furlongs to run.

In a sport that has been closing doors for a generation, this is the strange picture Wyoming offers: a bare-bones grandstand and a parking lot full of pickups; a billion-dollar gaming engine humming in the background; ranchers finding a new revenue stream to keep families on the land; and a cadre of lifers and fresh faces still chasing the same old feeling when the gates pop and eight hearts bolt into the wind.