California Thoroughbred Trainers

Ahead of a critical California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) meeting Thursday to decide essentially whether or not to give Northern California stakeholders a fighting chance to build a circuit in the void left by the imminent closure of Golden Gate Fields, 1/ST Racing and Gaming set out their stall Tuesday in a letter to the regulator urging them to decline race dates to the North. In a proposal to the state regulator, the California Association of Racing Fairs (CARF) outlined a 10-week meeting this year that would run from Oct....

Trainer Jerry Hollendorfer has lost the first phase of his legal tussle against the Los Angeles Turf Club and The Stronach Group (TSG) controlled subsidiary owners of Santa Anita Park, according to a ruling filed Apr. 29 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court of California. The bifurcated non-jury trial, conducted between Apr. 4 and Apr. 6 this year, focused on a single declaratory relief cause of action, encompassing the proper legal interpretation of the race-meet contract between the California Thoroughbred Trainers (CTT) and the track. In all, Hollendorfer has...

Last week, a Santa Anita press release had the misfortune of arriving amid the squall of a busy news cycle. In a nutshell, the release shared this not insignificant titbit: The track had wrapped a 16-day race meet, and a one month and 20-day training period, with zero fatalities. Since the beginning of the winter/spring meet last December, there have been five racing fatalities--zero on the main dirt track--from 5,069 individual starts. The resulting ratio for the year of an average of 0.98 fatalities per 1,000 starters made Santa Anita...

Santa Anita Park has broken ground on a new turf chute adjacent to the main dirt track's seven-furlong chute that will allow sprints up to 6 1/2 furlongs to be conducted on the grass oval. The new configuration won't be ready in time for the upcoming meet that commences Sept. 19. But once the extension is completed, track management is going to consider reopening the currently closed 6 1/2-furlong downhill turf course for select usage. Aidan Butler, the chief strategy officer and executive director of California racing operations for The...

Tuesday afternoon, the Thoroughbred Owners of California (TOC) announced that the California Thoroughbred Business League (CTBL) board had "unanimously approved" a $2-million subsidy from its reserves to be paid to Post Time Self Insurance Group--the self-insured workers' compensation program for trainers in the state. As part of the deal--which took some three months to negotiate--the various stakeholders have agreed to the creation of a new position of "Director of Safety," who will help establish and regulate uniform safety standards and implement them across all California training and racing facilities. Th...

Jerry Hollendorfer and the California Thoroughbred Trainers (CTT) filed a complaint for emergency relief in the Alameda County Superior Court Monday seeking either a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) or a Preliminary Injunction against the Pacific Racing Association (PRA) which would permit the veteran trainer to stable and race his horses at the association's Golden Gate Fields facility. Just last month, a judge at the Superior Court of San Diego granted the trainer a preliminary injunction against Del Mar, giving him permission to stable and race horses under his name at...