Richard L. Duchossois, who presided over the literal rise of Arlington Park yet played a part in its figurative fall, died Friday at his home in Barrington Hills, Ill., according to multiple sources. Duchossois had turned 100 on Oct. 7.  At the time of his death, Duchossois was chairman emeritus of Arlington, which came under the Churchill Downs Inc. umbrella in 2000. Duchossois had bought Arlington from Gulf & Western for a reported $17.8 million in 1983. At turn of the millennium, not long after he shuttered the track for two years demanding a less onerous tax burden (which he eventually got) from the state legislature, Duchossois allowed CDI to fold Arlington into its racetrack holdings in a stock purchase that made him and his family CDI’s largest shareholders.   In 1985, not long after Duchossois acquired the suburban Chicago racecourse, Arlington burned to the ground in an electrical fire that started in the horsemen’s lounge. The fire came during mid-summer and after famously clearing rubble and erecting tents, Arlington hosted the so-called Miracle Million that August.   Arlington, with Duchossois leading, had introduced the Arlington Million in 1981, the world’s first race with a seven-figure purse. It helped put Arlington on the global map and was an early driver of international participation in American racing, just as its founder hoped. Arlington also forged a relationship with Hanshin Racecourse in Japan, running the Hanshin Handicap while Hanshin hosted an Arlington Stakes. On two different occasions, including its current iteration, Arlington’s name was changed to Arlington International Racecourse, and Duchossois went out of his way to court overseas press and racing connections each Million season.   Duchossois, born in Beverly, a south Chicago neighborhood, first went to Europe as a member of the U.S. Army. He saw heavy action as a World War II tank commander, participating in the D-Day landing and earning two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart after suffering serious combat wounds.   Duchossois’s desire to host a Breeders’ Cup was fulfilled in 2002, but his sway at CDI waned over time as the company bought back stock from him and his family members. Gradually the world-class racecourse he’d built from embers of the 1985 fire, which had cost roughly $175 million by the time it was finished in 1989, lost its renowned luster. Corporate control in Louisville paid less attention to facilities upkeep than had the fastidious Duchossois, and Illinois racing, which for years lobbied unsuccessfully for legislative permission to open casinos, fell on hard times along with its flagship racecourse.   When in 2019 the latest round of Illinois gambling expansion finally included a provision permitting slots at tracks, CDI declined to apply for a gaming license. To many, that signaled Arlington’s end, and, indeed, after a couple seasons of increasing Arlington irrelevance, CDI last fall signed a purchase agreement with the Chicago Bears that, if consummated, likely will end in the destruction of the track Duchossois built.   The story Duchossois tells is that he got into racing only because he bought a horse for his son, the late Bruce Duchossois, when Bruce was a struggling high-school student. Duchossois at the time of his Arlington acquisition espoused no great love of the sport but eventually converted a dairy farm in Barrington Hills into a horse farm and became a major owner and breeder by Illinois standards.   Racing was only one relatively small segment of his working life. Duchossois married his wife, Beverly Thrall, in 1943 and was taken into her family’s business, Thrall Car Manufacturing, which had 35 employees when Duchossois began working there but grew exponentially under his guidance and ceaseless drive. When Thrall was sold in 2001 to Trinity Industries the company was valued at about $364 million. Duchossois expanded into various industries, including garage-door openers and military weapons, growing the family business, still privately held and now called The Duchossois Group, to a current valuation of more than $3 billion.   The Duchossois family were major philanthropists and the cancer center at University of Chicago Hospital bears his name. Beverly Duchossois was treated at U of C but died of cancer in 1980; Duchossois named a Grade 1 race on the Million card after her, the Beverly D.   Duchossois was a cancer survivor himself and returned from heart surgery to work steadily into his late 90s. Battles with other Chicago track operators and skirmishes with the local horsemen’s group seemed to be an annual feature of Duchossois’s business plan; he was a master at accumulating power and wielding it to maximum exertion, which, in turn, led to his vast capacity for wealth accumulation.   Duchossois is survived by his wife, Mary Judith, three children, seven grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren, many of whom visited Arlington this past August for the last Million, which had been renamed the Mr. D. Stakes, its purse reduced to $600,000.