Santa Anita will start racing on synthetic track this winter

Albany, Calif.

Santa Anita’s new $8 million synthetic track will not be just for training much longer. It will be used for racing starting with the winter-spring meet of 2024-25.

“I think we’ll have the opportunity to race on it,” Craig Fravel, 1/ST Racing executive vice chairperson of racing and gaming, told Horse Racing Nation on Sunday during the last day of racing at Golden Gate Fields. “Next winter I look forward to trying that out.”

Fravel said he did not expect to put any races on the innermost track during the fall meet, because the weather that time of year normally is much drier than it is for the long meet that Santa Anita starts Dec. 26.

“Usually, we don’t get much rain in the fall,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll need it in the fall, because we don’t really get much rainfall, hopefully. With climate change, it might turn into rain for us, but who knows?”

Santa Anita will be the second racecourse to card races on dirt, turf and all-weather tracks, following the lead established nearly three years ago by 1/ST-owned Gulfstream Park in Florida.

“We’re working out how the logistics of that might work,” Fravel said. “What the actual race distances might look like and whether we actually schedule them or leave them as off-the-turf, off-the-dirt days. We’re still in the thinking process on that.”

The main track at Santa Anita is a mile around, the turf course is seven furlongs, and the synthetic track that has been used just for training is not quite 6 1/2 furlongs.

Made by Tapeta Footings of Maryland, the all-weather surface was first used at Santa Anita on March 2.