Upcoming Del Mar, Los Alamitos meets will have safety review panels

A five-person panel of veterinarians and stewards will continue a recently enacted policy of reviewing the medical, training and race records of all horses entered to race at the summer meetings at Los Alamitos and Del Mar in coming months.

Rick Arthur, California’s equine medical director, said on Sunday that the personnel for the Los Alamitos panel had yet to be finalized. A Del Mar official said on Saturday that the track will have a review panel, and said an announcement on details will be made this week.

The panel was launched for the final two weeks of the Santa Anita spring-summer meeting that ended on Sunday. In six racing days, the panel rejected 38 entries, including 14 for Sunday’s races. One horse – Acadia Fleet – was denied entry on June 16 and on Sunday.

The creation of the panel was a reaction to a critical statement by California Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this month concerning a series of fatalities in racing and training at Santa Anita. At the time, Newsom called for greater oversight from veterinarians.

At Santa Anita, the panel focused extensively on veterinary records and were given the ability to scratch horses deemed unfit to race. Aside from Arthur, the panel consisted of chief steward Darrel McHargue, state veterinarian Tim Grande, and stewards Scott Chaney and Ron Church. All five members of the panel had to agree a horse was fit to race.

The Los Alamitos meeting runs through July 14 and will have the same objective, Arthur said.

“It will be a similar program,” he said on Sunday. “It’s a different environment and a different group of horses and we’ll have to feel our way through. It will have a similar goal – make racing as safe as we can.”