The first Santa Anita Handicap was run in 1935. It is the race that made kept bringing Seabiscuit back to the track. The Big ’Cap’s list of winners -- affirmed, John Henry (twice), Lava Man -- and winning jockeys -- Bill Shoemaker 11 times -- is as rich as any race in the nation.
And it could well be cancelled on Saturday. For the first time in nearly three quarters of a century. Because it’s supposed to rain.
Sure, the horses can run in the rain, so long as the track doesn’t turn into a lap pool. Ah, but therein lies the problem.
The synthetic surface put down in 2008 — something mandated by the California Horse Racing Board to help reduce injuries to horses -- doesn’t train well. It puddles and floods. You can’t run on it in the rain.
If racing is rained out on Saturday -- and the forecasters say there's a 70-percent chance -- then that will be 18 lost days to rain in the last two years. Compare that to the four days lost from 1935 until 2008.
So they are going to fix this, right? Put down a new track. Maybe some of that old-fashioned dirt stuff that Mother Nature invented and horses happily ran on long before we got around to domesticating and breeding them. The stuff the animal evolved to run on. That’s what everyone was told in January.
Not so fast… that costs money.
But early this week, track owner Frank Stronach plodded into the muck. He said the surface might not be replaced, that it might remain synthetic. In the midst of bankruptcy proceedings involving his parent company, an action from which Santa Anita was recently removed, Stronach seemed to be concerned about the $10-million price tag to replace the track.
In a classic head-scratcher quote, Stronach said, "As an intelligent person, you don't go out and spend $10 million without research."
A hundred years of horses racing on dirt is not research?
And people wonder why horse racing struggles in this country. It makes the management of Major League Baseball look smart and organized. Nobody is making money if the horses don’t run. Everybody looks bad when your premiere race is cancelled because of a normal seasonal storm.
Is it too much to expect the leaders of thoroughbred racing in California to get this right? Maybe. We should look into how to control the weather, we might be able to figure that out more quickly.
