Fans crowd Golden Gate for one last memory

More than an hour after Sunday’s first race, the line of cars stretched from the nearby freeway, down a short road and up the long hill leading to the public parking lots at Golden Gate Fields in Albany, Calif.

Normally, cars pull into the racetrack as if a person was going into a shopping center on a Tuesday morning. The last day of racing at the historic Bay Area track was different. Getting in more resembled the traffic jam before a big sporting event.

The track announced an ontrack attendance of 5,936. The crowd on the previous Sunday was 1,424.

Golden Gate Fields ran its final program of eight races on Sunday. At 5:40 p.m., the 5-year-old Irish-bred mare Adelie rallied from last in a field of seven under jockey Assael Espinoza to take the lead and win the final race.

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Espinoza, the 24-year-old leading rider at the track’s final season, celebrated the win well before Adelie reached the finish, pumping his whip in the air with his right hand.

Adelie was Espinoza’s 80th win of the meeting, which began on Dec. 26, and his 426th career win at Golden Gate Fields. He has won 637 races, including three on Sunday.

“What a way to end the meeting,” Espinoza told an in-house television broadcast. “Since the entries came out, I thought, that’s my win. The last race will be mine. I have so many great memories here.”

Espinoza’s career will continue this summer on the Northern California fair circuit, which is unchanged from recent years. The Alameda county fair meeting at Pleasanton begins a four-week season on Friday, followed by stops in Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Ferndale, and Fresno through mid-October.

In the fall, Pleasanton will host an autumn meeting at a time when racing was previously held at Golden Gate Fields. The meeting will be conducted by Golden State Racing, a consortium of Northern California-based horsemen, who will work with officials from the California Authority of Racing Fairs, which operate most of the fair meetings.

There are plans to race at Pleasanton next winter. Still, the sport in Northern California faces an uncertain and difficult future.

Golden State Racing will try to sustain racing in the region following the closure of Golden Gate Fields, which was announced last July by the track’s parent company, 1/ST Racing.

Golden Gate Fields was originally scheduled to close in December, but conducted a winter-spring meeting at the insistence of California racing officials. The meeting was far from smooth. Overnight purses were cut by 25 percent to recover a purse overpayment of $3 million from recent years, and the stakes program was reduced from 16 races during the 2022-2023 meeting to two this year.

In the spring, the track struggled to fill races, canceling six days of races because of insufficient entries.

Those difficult behind-the-scenes issues did not deter a large crowd from a final day at the picturesque track, which has breathtaking views of the bay, including the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge.

The crowd wanted one more afternoon of racing at a track that opened in 1941 and has been the hub of racing in the Bay Area since the closure of Bay Meadows in San Mateo in 2008.

Throughout the day, crowds of all ages lined the steps overlooking the paddock and winner’s circle. The grandstand seats, typically vacant, had a rare vibrancy.

Many fans who remained for the last race watched with phones aloft, recording a final memory.

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