California Horse Racing Board

The Alameda County Agricultural Fair Association voted Tuesday evening to pursue a race meet this summer, according to several sources. This is in contrast to a January vote by the California Association of Racing Fairs (CARF) to not apply for race dates in 2025. Tuesday's closed session vote launches a flurry of key details and obligations to be nailed down before a race-meet can go ahead at the track, all within a relatively short amount of time. This includes a response to the facility's long-standing regulatory wastewater and stormwater discharge...

Santa Anita opened its track Thursday morning to limited training--just joggers and gallopers for most of the morning. For the Santa Anita backstretch community, it was a slice of normality as the extent of the damage caused by the wildfires that have ripped across Los Angeles this week began to set in. "I've lived there half my life, almost. My daughter was born there. It's where she grew up. All of our memories together. I was just telling her, 'all of your medals and trophies for all the years you...

Every passing year seems to present California with a fresh set of challenges. The latest new leaf brings with it an entirely new racing framework with operations consolidated in the South. This comes on the back of the California Association of Racing Fairs' (CARF) decision last month not to pursue a race meet at Pleasanton during the start of 2025. On New Year's morning, the TDN sat down with Bill Nader, executive director of the Thoroughbred Owners of California (TOC). In part one of this interview, Nader discusses, among other...

Although the future of the Golden State Racing (GSR) meet at Pleasanton wasn't officially on Thursday's California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) agenda, the reverberations of dismal betting business through the first five weeks of operation at Northern California's new anchor track became the impassioned focal point of the Nov. 21 meeting. Citing concerns that the autumn Pleasanton meet isn't living up to the hope that the former fairs-season-only track might help fill the NorCal void that occurred when The Stronach Group (TSG) closed Golden Gate Fields back in June, Aidan...

Following news less than two weeks ago that seven Quarter Horses testing positive for Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA) at Los Alamitos were euthanized, the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) issued a grim update Wednesday evening. The infectious disease necessitated the euthanization of an additional five horses Oct. 16. Like the original seven, all five were Quarter Horses trained by Heath Taylor. A full listing of the 12 can be seen here. The full advisory issued by the CHRB follows: "Under the supervision of the California Department of Food and Agriculture...

A Quarter Horse stabled at Los Alamitos, which will hold its next Thoroughbred meet in December, was discovered to be suffering from Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA) in late September and has been euthanized. An additional six horses, all Quarter Horses who also tested positive for EIA, were euthanized at the California track Wednesday and Thursday. The California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) issued the following advisory late Thursday afternoon: "The California Horse Racing Board was notified on September 24 that Equine Infectious Anemia (EIA) was identified in a Quarter Horse at...

AmWest Entertainment LLC, the operator of AmWager.com, has received a license from the California Horse Racing Board and is now available to Golden State residents, the betting platform said in a release early Thursday. Horseplayers in California who are 21 years and older can now place wagers on over 450 U.S. and international tracks through AmWager's interface, which brings the number of states that the site is available in to 31. "Expanding into California is a significant milestone for AmWager, and we are excited to bring our premier wagering platform...

The nearly 6 1/2-furlong Tapeta training track at Santa Anita Park is being considered for racing in 2025 as an off-the-grass or wet-weather option. Nate Newby, the track's general manager, disclosed the work-in-progress plan after being prompted for an update on the nearly six-month-old surface by the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) during Thursday's monthly meeting. "Horsemen have been working over it for a couple months," Newby said. "Feedback is really strong. As Tapeta personnel would tell us, those tracks need a little bit to break in. But feedback has...

A federal judge in California on Monday terminated a nearly two-year-old lawsuit initiated against the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) by Thoroughbred owner Jerry Jamgotchian that alleged Jamgotchian's constitutional and civil rights were violated when the stewards at Los Alamitos Race Course denied entry to one of his horses in 2022 over a naming and registration controversy. Although the Aug. 12 ruling out of United States District Court (Central District, Southern Division) quashed the lawsuit itself, the litigation has never stopped the now 5-year-old Malpractice Meuser (GB) (Helmet {Aus}) from...

Tim Grande, the California Horse Racing Board's (CHRB) chief official veterinarian, remembers sitting among the first panel of experts charged with screening horses for elevated risk of injury even before they could be entered to race. "If an entry came across the racing office's desk, we had to give it approval before it could be accepted," said Grande, of the then new addition to the regulatory furniture mandated by the California Governor's office in the wake of the 2019 Santa Anita welfare crisis. "It wasn't particularly practical with just the...

It was déjà vu all over again at June's California Horse Racing Board (CHRB) meeting. Three months after a contentious meeting that saw board members vote unanimously to give race dates to Pleasanton Racetrack for a Thoroughbred meet this fall (in opposition to the wishes of Southern California track operators), the CHRB wrestled with another weighty conundrum: How to fund horse racing in California for the next fiscal year. Ultimately, the board approved what was termed a "compromise" funding model that will see each racing association cover the "direct costs"...

Trainer Richard Baltas has lost his petition for a writ of mandate against the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB), ending a legal tussle stemming from multiple charges of administering race-day supplements to his horses at Santa Anita in the spring of 2022. In a ruling publicly posted in early December of 2022, the CHRB handed Baltas a one-year suspension and a $10,000 fine for the alleged race-day administration of substances to his horses more than 20 times over roughly a three-week span the prior spring, and captured on surveillance video....