Golden Gate gets approval to race Mondays, abandon Fridays
With the approval Thursday of the California Horse Racing Board, Golden Gate Fields will shift its racing schedule to Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays for its upcoming meet, abandoning Fridays.
“Friday programs have been increasingly more congested,” Golden Gate Fields vice president and general manager David Duggan said at the CHRB meeting Thursday in Sacramento. “We’re swimming in shallower waters on a Monday.”
Duggan said the schedule shift was an experiment, so he did not commit to whether it would be desired during the longer, winter-spring meet. The upcoming 18-day season at Golden Gate Fields starts Saturday, Aug. 26, and runs three days a week through Monday, Oct. 2.
Opening weekend at Golden Gate comes at the same time as the Humboldt County Fair in Ferndale, Calif., runs the tail end of its six-day meet. That was the nexus of a dispute between operators of the two tracks. Humboldt executives felt their fields would be thinned by spreading horses between the two tracks. Golden Gate wanted the late August dates in order to keep turf horses from being lured to competing tracks. In the end, the CHRB sided last month with Golden Gate, which is owned by 1/ST Racing, and allowed both tracks to race during the last weekend of August.
The Ferndale meet approved for Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Aug. 18-27, faced another challenge because of roof damage from a 6.4 earthquake in December.
“The county said that the grandstand was not safe to conduct racing in the August meet,” California Association of Racing Fairs executive director Larry Swartzlander told the CHRB. “The position of Humboldt and CARF is very clear. We will race.”
According to Redding, Calif., TV station KRCR, Humboldt County supervisors voted unanimously Thursday to spend $1 million on a temporarily fix for the grandstand roof. Before the supervisors’ gave their approval, Swartzlander told the CHRB a contractor had been chosen to do the work that he expected to be completed by Aug. 1.
Even if the roof could not be fixed in time, Swartzlander said spectators could end up in temporary accommodations similar to those from the early days of simulcast betting.
“We did a lot of wagering in tents,” he said. “There’s always ways to do things. Everything in the grandstand could be moved to another location. I don’t see that as a concern.”