Changes on horizon as Los Angeles County Fair meet opens

CYPRESS, Calif. – The Los Angeles County Fair begins its final scheduled September meeting Friday at Los Alamitos.

Next year, the meet is scheduled to be held in two parts – a week in June and two weeks in December – as part of a widely revamped Southern California Thoroughbred calendar. It will no longer follow the traditional statewide county fair circuit.

In 2020, the September dates run for decades by the Los Angeles County Fair will be part of the Santa Anita autumn meeting.

This year’s 10-day meet continues through Sept. 22, with a first post of 1 p.m. Pacific daily. The track originally scheduled a 12-day season but has eliminated racing on Thursday of this week and Sept. 12 to ensure there are sufficient runners for the remaining days.

Racing will be held on a Friday-through-Sunday basis for the first two weeks followed by a four-day closing week from Sept. 19-22.

There are five stakes through the meeting, including two new $75,000 races for 2-year-olds at 6 1/2 furlongs – the Phone Chatter Stakes for fillies on Sept. 14, and the Capote Stakes for colts and geldings on Sept. 21.

Those races are restricted to horses that have not won a stakes worth $50,000 or more to the winner. The races replace the Barretts Juvenile and Barretts Debutante, sales progeny races that were discontinued after Barretts Sales ceased operation in California at the end of 2018.

The richest race at the meet is the $100,000 Los Alamitos Special at 1 1/4 miles on Sept. 15. The race is restricted to nonwinners of a stakes worth $50,000 or more to the winner at a mile or longer.

This will be the second of three brief race meetings at Los Alamitos this year. A three-week summer meeting was held from June 29 to July 14 over nine days. The track was scheduled to run 12 days, but canceled two days in June a month in advance because of concern over the available number of horses on the circuit. The July 11 program was lost because of insufficient entries.

Del Mar completed its 36-day summer meeting on Monday without any cancellations, but average field size fell from 8.69 in 2018 to 7.99 this year, the lowest of this century.

Friday’s eight-race opening program for the county fair meeting drew 50 runners, or an average of 6.2 runners per race before scratches. The summer meeting averaged 6.49 runners per race, while the 2018 county fair meeting averaged 6.84 runners. Los Alamitos does not have a turf course.

During the county fair meeting, a panel of stewards and veterinarians will review the medical, racing, and training records of all horses entered in an effort to improve safety. The panel was launched in June at the insistence of California Gov. Gavin Newsom following a series of 30 equine fatalities in training or racing at Santa Anita since late December.

In the final weeks of the Santa Anita meeting and during the Los Alamitos summer meeting, the panel reviewed the records of horses before entries were completed. At Del Mar, the panel reviewed records after entries were compiled. A similar plan will be in place at the county fair meeting, according to racing secretary Bob Moreno.