By admin 
SHAKOPEE, Minn. – You can visit Canterbury Park on the last day of another racing season and see younger parents with kids racing about, and notice a couple of college-age women looking for winners on their phones and not in a Daily Racing Form, and still find the “regulars” exchanging strong opinions, while also reminding themselves of those grand early days of Minnesota’s pari-mutuel racetrack in what was then mostly wide-open Shakopee acreage.
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The track was originally titled Canterbury Downs, with local ownership in concert with the Strub family’s Santa Anita operation, and it opened on June 26, 1985.
When the track opened, there was a pot-building bet – the Pick Six – that started to attract the attention of Minnesotans. Put together a ticket with six winners and you might collect a large sum, particularly if such a ticket hadn’t been cashed for a couple of weeks.
By 1986, with an earlier and longer season, we had the big hitters flying in with briefcases of cash to buy Pick Six tickets. There was nothing else like this in our parts. And the only competition near Canterbury for gambling was the Little Six bingo parlor run by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) a couple of miles up the hill.
And then slot machines were added to bingo for Minnesota’s Indian gaming. And then the state started selling lottery tickets.
SMSC first built the Mystic Lake Casino inspired by slot machine revenues, followed by the addictive blackjack being dealt.
Now there are acres of fabulous outlets for gambling, entertainment, dining and lodging up there, and Canterbury Park is the poor relative in the valley – gamely holding on with a live racing season, due to owner Randy Sampson’s loyalty to a family sport, and owners, trainers, jockeys, hotwalkers, barn employees … people who like four-legged athletes more than money.
The lottery killed the Pick Six as the get-rich attraction and taking 150-200 turns on the slots in the same time it took between Canterbury races cooked the golden goose for the track. The second owner, Ladbroke, closed the track at the end of 1992.
The Sampsons, father Curt and son Randy, and partners bought Canterbury a year later, paid off the debts, showed simulcast races for a year and reopened for racing in 1995. Randy was the hands-on owner from the start; his dad died in 2020, at age 87.
“When we bought the track, lots of open space all around the track,” Randy said last weekend. “There was a business guy at the closing who said, ‘You know what this is, don’t you? A real estate – 350 acres in what will be a growing community.’ “
Sampson smiled at that recollection and said: “It took us over 20 years to start taking any advantage of that. We now have 50 acres left.”
For a couple of decades, you would make the turn off Hwy. 169 and there was the Canterbury steeple, rather majestically, in the distance.
Now, the track is over there some place, if you peek over the restaurants and other additions. Unless you come in from the other side and are met with the view of the Mystic Lake Amphitheater – Ned Abdul’s amazing 19,000-seat, outdoor music behemoth that opened this summer on land purchased from Canterbury.
Does Canterbury benefit from the actual concerts?
“We might get a few people over in our card room before a concert, but, basically, we rent three parking areas – $2,500 each,” Sampson said. “They tell us in advance. Iron Maiden is here tonight. They are using all three.”
Iron Maiden? You could have some card-playing, horse-betting, aging metal-heads drop in at your casino.
Sampson nodded and said: “Look around. The people are still here. The families are still here on a weekend with their young kids.
“The other day, a guy in his 40s, handicapping each race, came up to me and said, ‘Randy, I know it’s tough, but I’m so grateful to everyone that you keep live racing going. I first came here with my dad, as a young kid; I got hooked on the races then, and this is still a big thing in my life.’
“I make a point of walking around with the fans every day, and I hear similar stories all summer.”
The Canterbury card room received a huge boost when straight blackjack – at first not allowed when it opened – started being dealt. The room was bustling around 3 p.m. Saturday, an hour before the races would start.
It was a nine-race card, one more than the current norm because it was the season finale and there would be no racing Sunday. Kevin Gorg was filling in for Paul Allen as the race caller; he had to start the action with an update on Shimmering Jade, a runaway horse that did a couple of rider-less laps that delayed the opener on grass for 15 minutes.
The complaint you hear from Canterbury regulars is short fields. There were only six in the opener, and Jade’s wild adventure reduced that. Shorter fields mean shorter prices for true handicappers.
“When we had our deal with Mystic Lake for 10 years, that put an extra $7.5 million into our purses,” Sampson said. “Our purses were about $15 million for the meeting. We had around 1,200 different horses in some of those years. Now, our purse total is about $8 million and we around 700 this summer.”
So what’s the future of Canterbury racing?
“We’ll be back in 2027, for 50 days again,” Sampson said. “As long as we have the racing people who want us, and families are still showing up to enjoy this, we’ll keep it going.”
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This story was originally published September 24, 2026 at 2:41 AM.