Solomon Sharpe, executive chair of Caymanas Park in Kingston, Jamaica, is a third-generation horseman whose passion for the sport is matched only by his passion for its business side. When the track opened in 1959, Sharpe’s father was an assistant trainer, making the success of horse racing on the island personal. 

After graduating from Tiffin University in Ohio with a degree in business management with an emphasis on marketing and sports management, Sharpe returned home.

Now 55, Sharpe was hired by track owners Supreme Ventures Racing and Entertainment, which took over management of the track from the government in 2017.

“We knew we had to do something different, to change the whole look and feel of the product, and to bring the product into a modern day and really connect on a global scale,” he said. 

But the changes didn’t stop there. Under Sharpe’s leadership, Caymanas Park added new video boards, expanded its betting menus, forged relationships with AmTote and the New York Racing Association, and continues to push forward with other upgrades. 

High on Sharpe’s to-do list are lights and a turf track. 

“It’s not cheap to build a grass track right now. We’re sitting on a water table, so water is easy to get to. It would be easy to irrigate the racetrack because right now we have two wells on the track that supports us. … I told (SVRE) that if I get lights and if I get a grass track, it’s going to significantly change the whole game, because I can now import all the animals that they’d like.”

With Caymanas Park having recently hosted the $250,000 Mouttet Mile, Sharpe has his sights on growing its biggest racing weekend into one with international appeal. 

BloodHorse: With a purse of $250,000 for the Mouttet Mile, that’s going to catch a lot of people’s attention.

Solomon Sharpe: We wanted to stimulate this whole industry, to revive it, to get back to the glory days. … We think that we can make Caymanas Park a global playground for races. The whole vibe and the excitement of today has gone further afield. It’s not just an exciting race for the people who are interested in horse races, because now it’s become a really exciting event for people, for non-horse racing people. And if you’re going to grow any sport, and if you’re going to grow any product, you can’t look to your traditional audience to continuously get support.

BH: You want to be more involved in the global horse racing landscape. Where do you see Jamaica in that landscape say, five years from now? Ten years from now?

SS: Three years from now, I want to see a Mouttet Mile. …. I’d love to go further afield and not just partner with NYRA, but also partner with Hong Kong Jockey Club and UK Tote, and bring it to being a really global event. In five years, I’d love to be able to implement a grass track, and in five years, if we have a grass track, then it opens us up to more global participation, not just on the dirt track that we have, and we have a very nice dirt track with that. We use dune sand. All of the foreigners that come here absolutely love our racing surface, but we want to be more dynamic with the product. So we’d love to have lights. We’d love to have grass, then a Mouttet Mile (day) would have at least 30 to 40 private jets on the tarmac at the airport—a real global playground. We have great weather right now. When you look at three-quarters of America right now, they’re freezing. If you look at 90% of Canada, they’re freezing over. In Europe, it’s pretty chilly. So Jamaica, at this time of the year is a great place to be.

We want to be like all of the global destinations where it’s a real fun weekend, at least one great race day, maybe two. … And then it will help with our distribution of our betting platforms, and it will increase betting on our betting platforms, we can increase from 80 days (of racing) to we think 100 days per year. We have the space for it on the property. We have under 96 acres.

When we have more global liquidity going through the totes on our different platforms, then we’ll be able to provide more purses and better purses, and gradually grow the sport. On race days, we’re averaging about 9.5 starters per race, give or take. Once we do that, our field size will be great for global betting. That will be great for local betting. Then on that day, that big global day, we’re probably going to be running for a total of a million dollars U.S. We’re probably going to have maybe a couple of $300,000 races. And one of these days, maybe one for $500,000, and we think that we can get there.

BH: You’ve said there were issues growing the sport domestically but once those issues were examined, the industry moved quickly. Can you talk about what those steps were and how you were able to turn things around, to get yourselves on the trajectory that you’re on now?

SS: That wasn’t easy, because for you to turn around something, you almost have to have radical change, and you have to challenge the status quo. … At the time when I took over, (Caymanas Park) was 60 years old, and I had to strip it down to billboards, figuratively. Sometimes I felt that I was literally doing that, because in horse racing we are big on tradition and very afraid of change. But I realized that for us to fit into the global marketplace, we had to make the changes, and we had to start to communicate in a whole different way. We had to start changing how we operate. … Once we took that approach, and I wrote a business plan for the business in 2019 and I presented it early 2020, only for COVID to come in the way. However, the business plan spoke about agility. The business plan spoke about being nimble.

BH: You mentioned wanting to turn this event and the track into a global playground. When you accomplish this, it’s going to mean a lot to more than just the racing industry. It’s going to have a greater impact on the entire Kingston community, won’t it?

SS: It’s going to have a great impact on the entire Jamaican community. So we’re going to be able to market Jamaica to the global audience that will be watching us. That’s number one. Because if you even get 10,000 people coming, flying in for the event, you’re going to have 300,000 people watching, and those people watching will be as impacted as the people on the ground. Even if we don’t get those people for that weekend, we might get them the weekend after the week and after, so it’s going to be a great recruitment product. Anybody who would have come here is going to tell you about the time they have had. … It’s not just about the racetrack, but we have a rich cultural history in Jamaica that this playground is going to be wanted to be had with wives and families. We have beaches in Kingston, and if I’m going to drive an hour and a half to a racetrack, which a lot of people have to drive to the Kentucky Derby, to the Breeders’ Cup in Santa Anita Park, to the Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar, there’s an airport in Montego Bay. We don’t just want to fill the hotels in Kingston, we want to fill the hotels along the coast, where they’re jumping into a bus and they’re coming in numbers similar to what you see at all the global events. … We want our event bigger than the Pegasus one day.