Big dollars, small fish torpedo Shamrock training center
Frank Vespe
January 21, 2026
The demise of Shamrock Farm as the training center for Maryland racing going forward came as a result of two factors, a Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA) official said today: big dollars and a small fish.
“It became pretty clear in the fall of ‘25 just from the [due diligence] efforts we’d done so far in that six, seven months that the costs were a lot more than anybody anticipated to try and take this bucolic farmland and transform it into a training center,” MSA Executive Vice President Gary McGuigan told the Maryland General Assembly’s House Appropriations Committee.
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The dollars were one thing, but the fish – a brown trout – was the “fatal flaw,”
The Maryland Dept. of the Environment (MDE) on October 17 informed MSA that a waterway near Shamrock, which is in Woodbine, contained brown trout and “cannot increase in temperature,” he said.
That left MSA with a choice.
“We could take six months and try and prove that all the development would not affect the waterway,” McGuigan explained. “Or we could stop.”
The likelihood of obtaining that proof, the MSA estimated, was small. So the choice: spend more money and time, perhaps six more months, to make a case that likely would fail.
“We saw that as a fatal flaw, and that’s when we started looking at Laurel,” McGuigan said.
The state law governing the project requires that at least $110 million be spent on developing the training center. The MSA’s reluctance to push ahead on Shamrock came in part because it already was projected to blow through that minimum and perhaps start eating into moneys available for Pimlico.
“The minimum spend in the statute is $110 million for the training center,” McGuigan told the committee, which is chaired by Del. Ben Barnes, a Democrat representing Prince George’s and Anne Arundel Counties. “We were looking at north of $210 million.”
McGuigan laid the blame for the Shamrock situation at the feet of the Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority (MTROA), which the General Assembly unexpectedly shuttered last year. On the recommendation of the MTROA, the state paid about $4.5 million to purchase Shamrock, the “ultimate disposition” of which, McGuigan said, “is unknown.”
“We didn’t know about the trout before we made the purchase?” one delegate asked him. “There wasn’t any kind of study period before that was done that would have turned that up?”
“Shamrock was selected by the MTROA earlier last year,” McGuigan said. “The Stadium Authority and MEDCO [Maryland Economic Development Corporation] had no input into that decision. The issue with MDE was revealed in October ’25.”
Of course, transforming Laurel into a state-of-the-art training center may not be a walk in the park either. An earlier analysis found major issues with virtually every structure on the grounds, and the backstretch dormitories have been a major cause for concern over the years.
McGuigan pointed out that MSA already has some familiarity with Laurel from earlier work it had done, and he added that the state currently has “consultants working on behalf of the state right now to look at the environmental risk… That will be weighed into any decision the state may makes on the when we get to the purchase agreement.”
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