Santa Anita raising some purses at fall meet, bringing back place pick all wager
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Santa Anita plans to increase purses, and offer a new bet at its 19-day autumn meeting from Sept. 25 to Nov. 1, track officials told the California Horse Racing Board on Wednesday.
Track general manager Nate Newby said purses for maiden races will be raised from $60,000 at the 2025 autumn meeting to $65,000 this year. In recent years, purses for those races have ranged from $54,000 in the fall of 2024 to $61,000 for the 2021 through 2023 seasons.
Newby said that a purse pool overpayment, which was high as $6 million in recent years, has been substantially reduced.
“We hope to have that close to zero by the end of the year,” Newby told the board. “We’ve made a ton of progress over the last few years.”
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In an interview on Wednesday, Santa Anita racing secretary Jason Egan said purses for many categories of races at the fall meeting will be increased from $1,000 to $5,000, while some divisions will have purses equal to the 2025 fall meeting.
Typical of an autumn meeting at Santa Anita, the first two weekends include 14 stakes, many of which are prep races for the Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland on Oct. 30-31.
Santa Anita’s license for the autumn meeting was approved by the racing board on Wednesday.
The track is reintroducing a $1 place pick all for the first time since the fall of 2013, Newby told the racing board. The bet will be held on the final eight races daily, and will have a reduced takeout of 15 percent.
Newby told the racing board that the track is exploring various avenues to increase television coverage following the reduction in coverage at FanDuel TV as of June 30. The network announced earlier this year that is reducing its ontrack coverage to a small number of venues in the second half of this year, and will cease all such programming by the end of the year.
Santa Anita is in discussion with the “America’s Day at the Races” program on Fox Sports, and plans to “expand YouTube options,” Newby said. He hinted the coverage could be enhanced by a “new digital platform,” but did not offer specifics.
The racing board approved a two-week daytime Thoroughbred meeting at Los Alamitos from Sept. 11 to Sept. 20 that will run on a Friday-through-Sunday basis.
The meeting will have a new stakes – the $100,000 Becca Taylor Stakes for 3-year-old fillies at six furlongs on Sept. 12. The race replaces the $100,000 Dark Mirage Stakes for fillies and mares at a mile.
In other developments at Wednesday’s meeting, executive director Scott Chaney announced that $4 million of the regulatory body budget of more than $17.1 million for the 2026-2027 fiscal year will be derived from the state of California’s budget.
The remainder will be paid by racetracks and horsemen’s organizations from funds generated from handle that would be devoted to purses or commissions to tracks.
Racing board chairman Greg Ferraro cited the efforts of commissioner Peter Stern in negotiating with state government officials to assist funding the racing board.
Chaney reported there were 33 musculoskeletal injuries at California tracks in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. There were 53 musculoskeletal injuries in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, according to the racing board’s website.
“Obviously, one is too many,” he said.
The figure has declined from recent decades. Chaney cited 345 fatalities in 2008 and 128 in 2019.
“This extremely low number represents hard work by the CHRB and stakeholders,” Chaney said. “Our work is not done. The progress we have made is undeniable.”
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