Santa Anita Handicap takes another hit

The first time the Santa Anita Handicap was canceled came in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the forces of Imperial Japan on Dec. 7, 1941.

Within days it became clear that the West Coast of North America would be on high alert and, as a result, there would be no racing at Santa Anita that winter. The traditional opening day of Dec. 26 came and went while U.S. military forces mustered for war and horses that might have been stabled at Santa Anita headed north to Bay Meadows – which had received a temporary reprieve from closure – or remained in the East, awaiting news of racing’s wartime fate.

The Santa Anita Handicap was not run again until June 30, 1945, as the highlight of a brief meet cobbled together in the wake of V.E. Day, and it has been run as scheduled every year since. Until now. Saturday’s cancellation, without rescheduling announced, of the 83rd running of the Santa Anita Handicap is sobering enough. The reason for it strikes to the heart of the game. After 21 equine deaths this winter – including 16 in training and racing on the main track – track management has called an indefinite halt to racing while the dirt surface is repaired by Dennis Moore, the veteran track superintendent who left Santa Anita prior to the meet and has returned as a consultant.

From a certain standpoint, losing the Handicap’s place on the calendar is no big deal. Stakes races are rescheduled all the time, and with little ripple in the fabric of the game.

But for this correspondent, who has witnessed all but one Santa Anita Handicap since 1973 (sorry, Mr Purple), the cancellation of the race on Saturday is nothing less than meddling with one of the primal forces of Thoroughbred racing, to borrow from Paddy Chayefsky. It will take considerable scrubbing to erase the stain.

Granted, the Santa Anita Handicap is not the same race won with national fanfare by the likes of Round Table, Ack Ack, Affirmed, Spectacular Bid, or any of the other dozen Hall of Famers decorating the list. The Dubai World Cup dwarfed its purse, and now the Pegasus World Cup – offered by Santa Anita’s parent company – has diminished its lure even further.

However, the race was for the longest time the old-fashioned handicap owners coveted, trainers lived to win, and fans shared with their children. It was nothing less than California’s most important event.

And the Handicap came through, more often than not. When the Handicap returned to its traditional date in 1946, a post-war crowd of 75,588 turned up to watch War Knight and Johnny Adams beat First Fiddle. It was the stage for Cougar II beating Kennedy Road a nose beneath dark, brooding clouds in 1973, and for heavyweights John Henry and Perrault throwing down in 1982.

The Santa Anita Handicap is still a very important race and deserves better. If it is rescheduled, fine, but it won’t be the same, now that a classy contender like Gift Box may opt for Dubai, and McKinzie, who would have been favored, could look to other options.

In the first two months of 1980, when Spectacular Bid was on the scene, Santa Anita got every bit of the more than 20 inches that fell on Los Angeles without a significant interruption of play. The total topped 18 inches during the same period in 1993, there was a 13-inch February in 1998, and more than 14 inches fell in January and February of 2001.

Southern California racing has survived trackrelated breaks before. In the fall of 2005, turf racing at Hollywood Park was lost for the meet when the new grass wouldn’t grow. During the winter of 2006, there were 11 racing days lost at Santa Anita because the synthetic surface would not drain.

The total this year to date has topped 13 inches, but this time around it has been accompanied by the rash of equine fatalities. If the condition of the main track is at the root of the breakdowns – and it is, after all, the only readily provable factor that all of them have in common – Moore’s rehabilitation of the surface should restore a degree of equilibrium to the grim statistics.

In the meantime, Thoroughbred racing must deal with the public-relations disaster that has grown with each passing day, fanned by a socialmedia network that did not exist on Jan. 9, 2005, when a horse was fatally injured in the first race of a very wet day at Santa Anita and the rest of the card was canceled.

At the end of the renovation, when Moore’s work is done and the training community is satisfied, hopefully there will be someone from track management who can stand tall before the predictable media onslaught and answer questions about medication rules and pre-race exams, and the detailed science of track-surface composition and management. Ideally, that someone will offer the many tales of grooms and vets who stay up all night nursing a stricken mare with colic, of heroic surgeries and miraculous recoveries of the modern racing age. And in the end, that someone must vow that the welfare of the horses and their riders always will be heavily favored in a race with the bottom line.