Put the horse back in horse racing

Optimism’s seldom in short supply around a racetrack. Even in troubled times, a convoy of yesterday’s losers can be counted on to return the next morning with their fantasies of winning the Pick Six intact. The jockeys who got beat by a nose or a neck, along with the trainers whose horses were pinned on the rail or otherwise impeded by fate, are also ready to do battle again. The air’s thick with yearning.

So racing fans are entitled to be hopeful about Santa Anita’s prospects on the opening day of its annual winter meet. Gone is the synthetic Pro-Ride surface that caused so many problems, swapped for a track of sand and clay. The lovely Art Deco plant is in tiptop shape, the bougainvillea’s flourishing, and track officials have every right to wish for an uptick in attendance that will defy the industry’s downward trend.

If horse racing deserves to thrive anywhere, it ought to be at America’s classiest track. Once, Angelenos flocked to Arcadia in droves for the major stakes and handicaps. In 1958, a near-record crowd of 61,123 turned out to see the eccentric Silky Sullivan perform in the Santa Anita Derby, for instance. Silky did not disappoint. As usual, he broke slowly and spotted his rivals 28 lengths before he came from off the pace to trounce them.

More than ever, the sport needs horses like Silky Sullivan, and like Zenyatta — the great Kentucky-bred mare who lost the Breeders’ Cup Classic (and ended an extraordinary 19-race winning streak) by a head in November — to raise the level of interest in the game. Some 11,000 admirers convened at Hollywood Park this month to bid her farewell before she departed for retirement in the Bluegrass State. No one could bet on her, but no one really cared. People simply wanted to express their gratitude and affection.

Such noble animals remind us of a truth many tracks tend to forget as they scramble after the dwindling gambling dollar. At its best, racing embodies an intrinsic, intuitive bond between horses and human beings that should be recognized and nurtured. Gimmicks like superfectas and slot machines may have the opposite effect — they obscure the beauty of thoroughbreds and cater to folks who might willingly bet on monkeys riding greyhounds if given half a chance.

Every track relies on the hard-core gamblers known, not unfondly, as “degenerates” to pay the bills, but the general public — largely indifferent to exotic wagering —shows up in numbers only for high-quality racing and the chance, however rare, to witness the equine sublime.

Unlike optimism, though, good horses are in shorter supply than ever, primarily because of a smaller crop of foals. It’s impossible to round up enough first-rate stock for an eight- or nine-race program five days a week anywhere on Earth, so racing secretaries at low-rent tracks must depend on sorry nags to grease the betting wheels and serve the bottom line. This does the sport no favors and reinforces the public’s perception of it as a vehicle for curious goings-on.

That doesn’t have to be the case, and it isn’t always in Britain. True, the English have a few tracks as dire as our own worst — Wolverhampton, say, where lackluster horses run in sleet, snow and gale-force winds to satisfy the whims of heartless punters — but they treat their finest racecourses as national treasures and exert a rigorous sort of quality control.

At York on the Knavesmire, a lovely course established in 1730, racing takes place only 18 days a year; at Chester, where spectators scale the medieval walls of the city to watch the action for free, it’s 14 days; and even at fabled Ascot, where the bookies take bets on the color of the hat the queen’s going to wear, it’s just 18 days of flat racing and 10 days for the jumpers over hurdles and steeplechase fences.

York, Chester, Ascot and other top tracks bundle their best, most lucrative races into three- and four-day festivals. Intensely competitive, the festivals can be as tough to handicap as the Breeders’ Cup card, and the stands are often jammed to capacity even though the featured races are carried live on network TV. Because the racing’s a novelty rather than a daily exercise in drudgery, it has the appeal of a county fair.

The horses too are treated better. In England, they aren’t confined to barns on the backside. Instead they’re quartered at their trainers’ “yards” in pretty farm country and reach the tracks by van. They run without the “help” of either of the drugs Lasix and phenylbutazone — commonly used in the U.S. to prop up faltering stock, or allow a tired or an unsound animal to race.

Quality comes at a price, of course. The cheapest seats for a day at York’s famous Dante Festival cost $38; a posh seat will set you back $82. Yet the patrons gladly pay because they get their money’s worth. Surely it’s heretical to think a top-flight American track might someday adopt a similar policy — limit the racing, improve the product, raise admission prices and settle for a smaller but steadier margin of profit — but again, one can dream.

Instead, the push continues for more casino-style gambling as a Band-Aid for an industry in crisis, and that will force horses further to the margins, although at Santa Anita, still happily free of the slots, the fans can get a taste of the sport as it was meant to be. There’s no better spot than Clocker’s Corner on a bright winter morning, with a dusting of snow on the San Gabriels and the horses on the gallop.

Bill Barich’s books include “Laughing in the Hills,” about Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Northern California, and the recently published “Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America.”