Santa Anita may add racing dates

ARCADIA, Calif. - Santa Anita will run a rare non-holiday four-day racing week starting on Friday, recently adding Monday as a makeup day for a weekend of races lost in January because of the wildfires fires that struck Los Angeles County.

Track officials said recently that there may be more dates added to the schedule before the end of the spring season on June 15, depending on availability of horses.

“We want to run as much as we can,” said track general manager Nate Newby.

Aside from this weekend, the only other scheduled four-day racing week is in late May, ending with the Memorial Day program on May 26.

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Newby said last weekend that periodic assessments will determine whether adding additional days is feasible. There are currently no plans to go to a four-day racing week on a regular basis.

“We’ll keep looking forward and evaluating horse population,” Newby said. “We were comfortable adding this one. We’ll see how things are with fields. We want to keep field size up and see how it goes on a month-to-month basis.”

Santa Anita added racing days on Jan. 16 and 23 earlier this year after canceling the Jan. 10-12 programs because of wildfires.

Through Sunday, the average field sizes are higher than the corresponding days of the 2023-24 winter-spring season. The track has run 351 races with an average field of 7.6 runners per race since the season began on Dec. 26. For the corresponding period in the 2023-24 meeting, there were 317 races with an average field of 7.02 runners. For the entire 2023-24 winter-spring meeting, 417 races were conducted, averaging 7.08 runners.

This year, Santa Anita has had higher field sizes. This is due in part to the addition of stables from Northern California following the cancellation of a proposed winter-spring meeting at Pleasanton.

Several stables from that circuit have moved to Santa Anita, leaving the barn area at capacity with approximately 1,750 horses, according to stable superintendent Jeff Metz. Other stables from Northern California have relocated to Los Alamitos and the San Luis Rey Downs training center, Metz said.

At the 2023-2024 meeting, Santa Anita lost six days of racing because of rain in February and March and later made up three of those days. This year, there has been less rain in the region. Much of the wet weather has occurred on non-racing days.

Santa Anita’s winter-spring meeting concludes on April 6. The spring meeting begins on April 18.

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