In December 2025, when the Great Canadian Entertainment casino company announced the end of thoroughbred racing at Hastings Racecourse, it closed a chapter of Vancouver’s entertainment history. Aside from the track’s 136-year racing legacy, Hastings was also one of the city’s most identifiable and versatile filming locations, hosting stars including John Candy, appearing in TV shows such as The X-Files, and even inspiring a storyline about the future of the track itself.
First known as East Park and then Exhibition Park, Hastings Racecourse opened in 1889, only three years after Vancouver’s incorporation. The track predates Hastings Park’s other attractions: the PNE fairgrounds, Playland amusement park, and the Agrodome and Pacific Coliseum venues. During the Second World War, the racecourse stored the confiscated automobiles of Japanese Canadians en route to internment camps. In the 1950s and ’60s, the grounds were refurbished, the track lengthened, and the grandstands rebuilt, with lighting installed for night races.
While Hastings Racecourse’s first screen appearance is hard to determine, the track features in an early episode of The Littlest Hobo. The family-oriented series about the adventures of a wandering dog named Hobo first aired in 1963 before being revived in the 1970s. In season one of the 1963 series, “Stakeout,” Hobo befriends a nervous horse that keeps throwing its riders. Victoria stuntman Peter Kelch performed the fall, diving from a horse named Galla Glen, somersaulting in the air, and landing on a mattress covered with blankets. “They said they needed a stuntman to fall off a racehorse so I thought I’d try it,” Kelch told the Vancouver Sun’s Keith Bradbury.
The boom in Vancouver film and TV production in the late 1980s and early 1990s quickly made Hastings Racecourse a common filming location. Its five-furlong 208-foot oval track, open-air grandstand, paddock, main building, and concourse could easily double for any American racetrack. Jockeys, trainers, and of course the horses themselves often appeared as extras.
Jockey-turned-actor (and newspaper columnist) Tom Wolski recalled filming an episode of The Adventures of Black Stallion with Golden Age movie star Mickey Rooney. “The first day of filming at Hastings we had a scene together while we were sitting on a bench near the paddock,” Wolski wrote in The Province. “Rooney leaned over to say, ‘What a lovely racetrack you have here,’ expressing his love for Hastings and Vancouver.”
Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989), starring John Candy as a bumbling private eye, featured a scene where Hastings doubles as a California racetrack. Crumb disguises himself as a jockey—the size difference being the joke—and gets wedged in a jockey-sized phone booth. While Candy hoped Crumb would become a recurring character like The Pink Panther’s Inspector Clouseau, the movie was a flop. “Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, yet she panned Crumb as “little more than a weak comedy.” In later years, the website Den of Geek included Crumb on its list of underrated films of 1989, arguing “it’s still a lot of fun, and gives [Candy] a title role that he clearly enjoyed.”
Asked in 2003 if he’d made money betting on horse racing, Campbell exclaimed, “No! I’m gettin’ killed. We’re gettin’ killed. It’s just brutal.”
In Run (1991), a college kid played by future Grey’s Anatomy star Patrick Dempsey accidentally kills the son of a mobster and finds himself hunted through the streets of a Massachusetts town. The final confrontation between hero and hoodlums (one of whom is played by Vancouver acting luminary Jerry Wasserman) takes place at Hastings Racecourse, appearing as a dog track. According to the Sun, “Run’s company has spent about 40 days out at the racetrack and at Playland. They’ve filmed just about every inch of the track (which is where the movie’s climax happens), and even built two sets that stand in for the track.” Dempsey is chased up and down the grandstands, and even dangled off the roof of the main building.
Dead Heat (2002) starred Kiefer Sutherland as Pally, a retired cop whose wife (Radha Mitchell) and brother (Anthony LaPaglia) convince him to buy a stake in a racehorse. This unwittingly connects Pally’s fortunes to those of a jockey in debt to a loan shark. “The only way out is to bet it all,” claims the narrator of the trailer. Dead Heat’s race scenes were filmed at Hastings.
While Crumb, Run, and Dead Heat are lesser-known films, on the small screen, Hastings has appeared in some of the best-known series shot in Vancouver. “Race Against Time,” a season five episode of Danger Bay, finds Donnelly Rhodes, a single dad and marine biologist, trying to prove a horse owner is drugging the competition. William B Davis (The X-Files) and Tom Wolski co-star.
Speaking of The X-Files, the racecourse appears in the season five episode “Redux II” as the base of operations of the mysterious Well-Manicured Man (John Neville). “Filming at the track can be tricky, especially during the racing season, when film companies must contend not only with morning practices but with late afternoon racing four days a week,” location scouts Louisa Gradnitzer and Todd Pittson wrote in X Marks the Spot: On Location With The X-Files. “Here we were lucky enough to slip in with a Second Unit crew after morning practice on a day when ‘the ponies’ were not running.” Later in season five, the track’s terminal was transformed into a bus depot for the episode “Mind’s Eye.” (The track-for-bus depot swap was repeated for a season four episode of Fringe titled “Back to Where You’ve Never Been,” in which Hastings Racecourse stands in for New York’s Battery Park bus terminal.)
On Psych, the track serves as a main location for the season two episode “And Down the Stretch Comes Murder,” in which phony psychic-turned-crime-solver Shawn Spencer (James Roday Rodriguez) helps his former childhood bully, now a jockey, whose horses keep losing.
No showrunner has put Hastings Racecourse to better use than Chris Haddock. The track appears in two episodes of Haddock’s groundbreaking procedural Da Vinci’s Inquest, a show that Province columnist Dana Gee argued “raised the bar in Canadian TV.” In “You See How It Begins?” from season three, coroner Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) investigates a jockey found dead in the paddock. The episode was co-written by former aspiring jockey Frank Borg, who based it on an actual news story. “They shot it at Hastings Park and featured as actors many of the Damon Runyon-type characters who work at the track,” The Province wrote. In “In the Bear Pit” from season four, the wife of a horse trainer is discovered asphyxiated in the trunk of a car.
Off-screen, the track provided a common hangout spot for the Da Vinci’s cast and crew, especially the show’s star. Nicholas Campbell was no stranger to the ponies, having owned stakes in 60-odd horses over the course of his career. “If I had a choice of winning an Oscar or winning a big race, they can keep the Oscar,” Campbell told Tom Wolski. While in Vancouver shooting Da Vinci’s, Campbell became a fixture at Hastings, even appearing in Trackrecord, photographer Dina Goldstein’s series of portraits of racetrack regulars. (Asked in 2003 if he’d made money betting on horse racing, Campbell exclaimed, “No! I’m gettin’ killed. We’re gettin’ killed. It’s just brutal.”)
Hastings doesn’t only play itself in Da Vinci’s City Hall, the spinoff/continuation of Inquest—the track itself provided a key storyline. As mayor, Da Vinci searches for a buyer to preserve the jobs the track brings in and debates with city council over legalizing slots gambling on the site. Like much of the show, this storyline was inspired by real events: in 2004, Hastings was acquired by Great Canadian Gaming Corporation for $20.1 million, and the same year council approved adding slots.
In the pilot episode of Haddock’s series The Romeo Section, Hastings appears as a Hong Kong track where UBC professor and spymaster Wolfgang McGee (Andrew Airlie) meets a contact. Yes, this Vancouver landmark appeared in a (mostly) Vancouver-set series—as an exotic locale.
Declining revenues, real estate prices, and the government’s decision to stop sharing slot machine profits with the casino ended horse racing at Hastings. As of 2026, the future of the site is unclear.
With the end in sight, the on-screen history of the “lovely racetrack,” which served as a backdrop for Mickey Rooney and Patrick Dempsey among many others, comes to a close as well. As with much of Old Vancouver’s architecture, it’s preserved only in celluloid.
Read more from our summer 2026 issue.
