Los Alamitos officials will ask the California Horse Racing Board to reinstate the track’s request for a yearlong license for its 2021 evening meeting for Quarter Horses and lower-level Thoroughbreds and not the decision reached on Thursday for a license for the first six months of the new year.
The racing board approved the track’s license from Dec. 26 to June 30. Track officials sought a license through December 2021.
On most recent mornings at Golden Gate Fields, there is a line of cars parked at the top of the stretch for several hours, occupied by trainers watching horses being exercised. It’s as close as the trainers are allowed to get to their horses.
A coronavirus outbreak involving more than 300 of the approximately 500 backstretch employees in the Golden Gate Fields stable area led to a halt in racing last month and has severely curtailed day-to-day activity for the backstretch community.
Pierre “Peb” Bellocq, the most famous racing caricaturist of all time, and William Leggett, the late writer who covered racing for four decades, have been selected for inclusion in the National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, the Saratoga Springs museum announced on Monday.
A panel of stewards at Santa Anita in Southern California has dismissed a complaint seeking the disqualification of Justify from the 2018 Santa Anita Derby due to the finding of scopolamine in the horse’s post-race sample, citing the state regulatory agency’s power to consider mitigating circumstances.
A hearing into whether the New York-based trainer Linda Rice committed “corrupt or improper practices” by receiving lists of horses entered in races at New York Racing Association tracks prior to the close of entries concluded on Wednesday after Rice completed eight hours of testimony.
Golden Gate Fields will not resume racing until Dec. 26 at the earliest because of ongoing effects of an outbreak of coronavirus among stable employees, the track announced in a statement Thursday.
Golden Gate Fields ceased racing on Nov. 13, with officials stating at the time that racing would be disrupted for a week. A subsequent announcement put a halt to racing until this week before Thursday’s announcement of a further extension without racing.
Big fields and attractive betting opportunities on Friday at Los Alamitos typically would be cause for celebration, though festivities are quieter this season.
Los Alamitos begins its three-week daytime meet with an eight-race card bursting at the seams. Average field size is 9.6 before considering also-eligibles. It’s all good, except racing will be held with no fans and limited owners ontrack. It is an unfortunate byproduct of the COVID shutdown, which is also a reason for the overflow entries.
The New York Gaming Commission on Monday approved a proposed set of rules that would further restrict the use of painkillers in horse racing, along with a handful of other rules and proposals seeking to align the state’s regulations with other states in the region.
Generally speaking, 2020 has been an awful year, but not for Indiana Grand. The Indianapolis-area racetrack posted massive handle gains during a 96-day meet that concluded Nov. 18.
COVID-19 delayed the start of the Indiana Grand season, which began in mid-June, and permitted the track to race only 96 programs this season, yet gross handle for the year was up 24.3 percent, to $198,960,722, compared to the 120-day 2019 season.
