Fridays to be dropped from schedule due to shortage of older claiming horses
Los Alamitos is eliminating racing on Fridays effective July 16 during its ongoing Quarter Horse and lower-level Thoroughbred meeting due to a shortage of available horses, track owner Ed Allred said Thursday.
The track will race on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” Allred said. “It’s difficult to conduct an everyday program.
“The horse population is kind of skewered. We have very few older, cheap Quarter Horses. We have plenty of 2-year-olds. By the time they are 3, they are upper-level allowance horses or better.”
The track has an emphasis on major derbies and futurities for Quarter Horses. The $1.12 million Ed Burke Million Futurity was run June 20. Three other seven-figure races – the Los Alamitos Super Derby, Golden State Million Futurity, and Los Alamitos Two Million Futurity – will be run for Quarter Horses in the final months of the year.
Allred said the track will expand its Saturday and Sunday programs in coming weeks to run “nine or 10 races or more if we need to.”
This weekend, the track is running 25 races from Friday through Sunday evenings on eight- and nine-race programs. The eight-race Saturday program consists of six time trials for the Governor’s Cup Futurity on July 31.
“We have very few everyday claiming horses,” Allred said. “The good races are filling well. The futurities and derbies are at record levels. We’re struggling in some ways and other ways we’re not.”
Through July 3, the current evening meeting has averaged 6.07 starters per race since opening day of the yearlong season on Dec. 26. The figure includes races for Quarter Horses (6.38 runners per race), Thoroughbreds (5.76), and mixed races for both breeds (5.68).
The entire 2019-20 meeting averaged 6.22 runners per race from late 2019 to Dec. 20, 2020. At this point last year, the 2019-20 meeting averaged 6.33 runners per race, a figure helped partially by the closure of Santa Anita for nearly two months because of the coronavirus pandemic. Los Alamitos ran an uninterrupted meeting last year.
Los Alamitos is legally restricted to running Thoroughbred races for $5,000 claimers or less at 4 1/2 furlongs, but can offer similar races at a greater variety of class levels at 1,000 yards if Quarter Horses are allowed to enter. Still, fields for the 1,000-yard races consist almost entirely of Thoroughbreds. At the current meeting, there have been 146 mixed races from 609 races run through July 4. The majority of the races – 321 – were for Quarter Horses.
Allred said there is a “possibility” Friday racing could be restored later this year. The track does gain some new Quarter Horse stables after Labor Day when the Ruidoso Downs meeting concludes in New Mexico.