Santa Anita looking to run more races during spring-summer meet

ARCADIA, Calif. – There will be plenty of racing at Santa Anita during the spring-summer meeting that begins on Friday.

Tim Ritvo, the chief operating officer of The Stronach Group, the track’s parent company, said on Wednesday that the number of races run on a daily basis is likely to increase during the season, which runs through June 24.

Ritvo said the goal is to add one or two races a day compared to the corresponding racing days in 2017.

“We’re looking to expand if we can,” he said. “The balance is what the inventory can take.”

There are eight races scheduled for Friday. Ritvo said Saturday’s program could have 11 or 12 races. The same day last year had a 10-race program.

The first two weeks of the meeting have three days of racing on a Friday-through-Sunday basis. The remainder of the season will largely have four-day weeks, beginning on April 26.

The Stronach-owned Gulfstream Park frequently has had 12- to 14-race programs on recent Saturdays. Ritvo said that model is unlikely to be replicated in Southern California with a pool of approximately 2,800 to 3,000 available horses, depending on the time of year.

“We’re not trying to turn it into a Gulfstream Park,” he said. “It doesn’t have the dynamics that Gulfstream has.”

Santa Anita had a 13-race program last Saturday, the day of the Santa Anita Derby. There were 12 Thoroughbred races and the track’s annual stakes for Arabians.

The decision to expand the number of races comes a year after the track canceled four days of racing in April and June because of insufficient entries.

During the 2017 spring-summer meeting, the track carded 409 races that averaged 7.55 runners per races. By comparison, the winter-spring meeting that ended on Saturday had 524 races with an average of 8.01 runners per race. The 2016-17 winter-spring meeting had 510 races with an average of 7.59 runners during a wet winter. There was considerably less rain this year.

This year’s winter-spring meeting had average daily all-sources handle of $8,462,258, a gain of 9.3 percent over the 2016-17 meeting, which averaged $7,741,108, according to data provided by Ritvo. That includes ontrack, simulcast, and account-wagering venues.