Hovdey: The next thrill ride comes on horseback

The carnival had ended, but the memory lingered on. Roustabouts were busy tearing down tented pavilions and dismantling the Grand Wheel, G-Force, and Alien Abduction. Maintenance crews cleaned up after all manner of domestic livestock. The exotic food trucks had packed and were off down the road, taking with them the heady flavors of Australian Battered Potatoes, Chicken Charlie’s Deep-Fried Snickers, and a personal favorite, Everything Cheese.

Three days after the final nickel had been wrung from the last visitor to the midway, a wind-shredded flag still waved high atop the Del Mar grandstand bearing the message “A Fair to Remember.” There was a moment of confusion – was the theme related to a history of adultery and thrill rides? – but then reality settled in. Soon, the colors of the San Diego County Fair would be struck and replaced with those of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, but not before an unbelievable makeover once again had taken place.

To describe the task as “monumental” would be soft-pedaling. Imagine a summer renter’s worst nightmare. During the offseason, the landlord lent the place out to a band of grifting travelers. They raised cattle in the backyard, bred cats in the kitchen, and ran an off-the-books business in trinkets and doodads out the front. Then, after greasing the landlord’s palm with enough to make him shrug, they walked away from the place a day before you’re supposed to take up residence.

Good luck.

The 10-day window between the end of the San Diego County Fair last Sunday and the opening day of the Del Mar season next Thursday is a wall-to-wall exercise in barely controlled chaos. The parking lots need to be reclaimed, the interiors emptied of display elements and cleaned, the landscaping recovered and replaced.

And that’s just the front side. The stable area is left reeling from a month as a high-density squatters’ camp, a far cry from the safe, relatively clean environment required for horses and their caretakers. On Thursday – one week from opening day and one day before main-track training would begin – a few barns were being transformed by crews sent ahead by individual trainers. Bob Hess was one of the few already on the scene.

“There’s always a lot to do,” said Hess, who had a banner 2014 summer season with 15 winners, good for fifth in the standings. “The days are long gone, though, when trainers like Wayne Lukas and Rodney Rash would spend a lot of money on their barns here, just for the summer.”

Hess and the rest of the backstretch community will be faced this summer with yet another new racing surface. Del Mar has returned to dirt – there is a small mound of degraded Polytrack in the center of the small training track as a final reminder of the synthetic era – but track superintendent Rich Tedesco has been hard pressed this week to have the course set up to his liking before the onslaught begins.

“We lost a day at the beginning of the week,” Tedesco said, referring to a delay in the removal of fair-related equipment. “In a perfect world, you like to have everything ready when horsemen start to arrive – roads graded, stalls all prepped, tack rooms clean. Here there just isn’t enough time. And next year, it will be even tighter.”

Of all the corners into which California horse racing has backed itself, none is more ridiculous than the transition of Del Mar from its monthlong county fair, run by the 22nd District Agricultural Association and attended this year by more then 1.5 million people, to a first-class Thoroughbred meet. And it’s not as if the racetrack has a soft opening to iron out the kinks. Del Mar’s opener and its 40,000-plus crowd was moved again this year to a Thursday to help facilitate preparations, but that extra day was used up quickly.

During his early-Thursday rounds, Tedesco stopped by the Bob Baffert stable near the backstretch main entrance, where top kick Jimmy Barnes and a seven-man crew were busy setting up 13 metal pens for the horses who would be spending their summer al fresco.

“With American Pharoah here, I’ve got a feeling there will be quite a bit more activity, and it can’t hurt to check with Bob and Jimmy to make sure things go okay,” Tedesco said.

Barnes, busy installing green canvas screens shading the shed row nearest the Baffert office, was asked where American Pharoah would be living. Last summer, when the colt arrived at Del Mar as an unstarted 2-year-old, his stall was across the yard.

“He’ll be over here, but I’m not sure which stall,” Barnes said.

A promotion?

“Yeah,” Barnes said. “We had a little road trip that went pretty well.”

Satisfied that all was okay in Camp Baffert, at least for now, Tedesco spun a U-turn with his golf cart and headed to the next dozen things on his to-do list. One of them was juggling a crew spread thin moving dirt and sand, creating horse paths, and otherwise turning a multipurpose fairgrounds into a racetrack once again. At one point, resources had to be diverted because a large area had to be prepped for one last fairgrounds money-maker taking place hard on the doorstep of the Thoroughbred Club opener – the Crossroads of the West Gun Show.

And away they go.