ARCADIA, Calif.- There are two carryovers in the $2 pick six for Thursday’s eight-race program at Santa Anita.
The main pool begins with a carryover of $71,437. There is also a carryover of $38,404 in the single ticket jackpot portion of the bet, which is paid out only if there is a single winning ticket.
The pool of new money on Thursday could surpass $400,000.
The mutuel field, the 24th or “all others” option, closed Sunday as the 5-2 favorite over divisional champion Classic Empire (5-1) in Pool 2 of the 2017 Kentucky Derby Future Wager. The pool opened Friday at noon Eastern and ran through 6 p.m. Sunday.
Total handle for Pool 2 was $330,042, down 25 percent from the corresponding pool in 2016. Win handle was $227,880 and exacta handle was $102,162.
The winner of the $250,000 Albuquerque Fall Quarter Horse Championship this year will receive an automatic berth to the $600,000 Champion of Champions at Los Alamitos on Dec. 16, a first for the New Mexico race that was launched in 2015.
Over the weekend, Los Alamitos officials announced the qualifying format for the 440-yard Champion of Champions, the richest race for older Quarter Horses.
A California court of appeals on Jan. 26 overturned a 2014 California Horse Racing Board ruling suspending Quarter Horse trainer Jose De La Torre 38 months and fining him $160,000 for four clenbuterol positives at Los Alamitos in 2013.
The decision is not expected to result in De La Torre training at Los Alamitos; he remains banned from participating in races by track management. De La Torre will be allowed to apply for a trainer’s license, according to his attorney, former Thoroughbred trainer Darrell Vienna.
Bourbon Empire on Friday was announced as an early nominee to the Triple Crown, bringing to 419 the number of nominees at this stage of the process.
There were 418 3-year-olds announced as early nominees on Tuesday. Bourbon Empire's omission then, and addition on Friday, was because of a "clerical error," according to a press release from Churchill Downs.
Bourbon Empire has won once in two starts. He is entered in the Gander Stakes for New York-breds on Saturday at Aqueduct.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Handle at all California racetracks rose by slightly more than 2 percent in 2016, surpassing $3 billion, according to a report released at Thursday’s California Horse Racing Board meeting.
Handle at daytime Thoroughbred meetings, the yearlong evening Quarter Horse and lower-level Thoroughbred meeting at Los Alamitos, and Standardbred racing at Cal-Expo in Sacramento reached $3.04 billion, a gain of 2.09 percent over 2015.
Rene Araya, a multiple stakes-winning trainer on the New York Racing Association circuit, died Thursday in south Florida from complications associated with kidney failure. He was 73.
Araya, a native of Chile, came to the U.S. in 1968 with trainer Jack Weipert. Araya later worked as an assistant for Mid-Atlantic-based trainers Pedro Briones and Merritt Buxton. Araya worked as a jockey agent before taking out his trainer’s license in 1985.
He became a regular on the NYRA circuit in 1992.
CHICAGO – The Illinois Racing Board certified the annual recapture allocation to the state’s racetracks during a regular meeting Tuesday in Chicago. No commissioners voted against the certification, but one voted ‘present.’ About $11 million earned for purse accounts during 2016 at Illinois tracks was “recaptured” by track operators, while the Tuesday meeting, somewhat ironically, also brought about further discussion of a plan for the IRB itself to help fund purses this year.
Churchill Downs Incorporated on Tuesday named Douglas Shipley as the new president and general manager of Fair Grounds.
Shipley replaces Tim Bryant, who left the track to take another job in December.
Fair Grounds operates a slot-machine parlor ontrack and several video poker sites, and Shipley, like Bryant before him, comes from the casino industry rather than the horseracing industry.
