At the track, finding blame is the easy part

For the moment, the Great Race Place isn’t great. Santa Anita is having the winter of its discontent.

Traditionally, the thoroughbred horse race meeting that begins the day after Christmas, at the track at the foot of the scenic snow-topped San Gabriel Mountains, has the most expensive horses in the country and the best jockeys to ride them in an annual showcase for the sport.

A sport, it must be pointed out, that badly needs one.

This year, tradition has taken a back seat to chaos. “We shot ourselves in the foot,” says Jerry Moss, music record producer, owner of 2005 Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo, and a respected horse owner, as well as a member of the California Horse Racing Board (CHRB).

Santa Anita’s is a story of weather and new track surfaces.

Friday, the Great Race Place missed its 11th day of scheduled great races. That’s 11 days of missed paychecks for people who park cars, take tickets, serve food, take bets and sweep up afterward -- generally people who can least afford it.

Santa Anita’s Cushion Track doesn’t drain well, is mostly a mess and, on some days, was more like an airline runway than a cushion. Some of the times run, on days when they could run, were Secretariat-like. Ask a Santa Anita official for an explanation of the near world-record times by $12,500 claimers and he will excuse himself out of embarrassment and leave the room.

The fairest assessment is that this is the result of bad luck and some bad judgment. The fallout has been lots of anger, finger-pointing, second-guessing and told-you-sos. From the guy who makes the $2 bet to the guy who mucks out the stalls to the guy who has a stable full of horses and a monthly training bill of $25,000, everybody has an opinion and nobody is happy.

The most frequent face appearing in the bull’s-eye is Richard Shapiro, chairman of the CHRB. Shapiro led the charge that forced California track owners to spend roughly $10 million each to put down new, supposedly safer, racing surfaces. The perception was that horses were breaking down and dying in training and racing at alarming rates, and when Del Mar had the look of a daily death march in the summer of 2006, an urgency set in.

Soon came the CHRB mandate, of which Moss says, “Everybody involved in this was well-intentioned. Everybody in the room was on board.”

Well, not everybody.

There was one abstention in the voting. Moss.

“I just didn’t feel I knew enough,” Moss says now.

In retrospect, his might have been the brightest assessment of all.

Shapiro has tried to weather this storm, so to speak, with patience, poise and even humor.

“As we all know by now,” he wrote recently, “the manufacturer of Cushion Track changed the formula, and the sand mixture used at Santa Anita, rather than promoting drainage, actually prevents it. This particular all-weather track should have come with an asterisk: *except rain.”

Yes, some of the bad luck was weather. It rained a lot. That happens, even in Southern California.

And yes, there was some bad judgment involved in the selection of the vendor who provided the surface. Right now, the attempted repairs are being done by the vendor who finished second in the bidding. Apparently, he wasn’t good enough to build it, but he is to repair it.

Oops.

Ron Charles, the respected president of Santa Anita, has been under fire for more than vendor selection -- such as for his three-days-race, four-days-fix rotation. Wasn’t it obvious there was a problem long before Dec. 26? Would it not have been better to tear up the track after the Oak Tree meeting in November and take as long as needed to fix it correctly, rather than keeping fingers crossed and praying for dry weather?

That, of course, is easy hindsight.

Also easy are the many verbal brickbats being hurled at Shapiro, who, with horses going down, responded to an apparent need by doing something, rather than nothing.

“I truly don’t care if we run in dirt or on synthetic,” he says, “I just want what is the safest and best.”

The actual numbers documenting the success of synthetic tracks are elusive, and controversial.

Rick Arthur, equine medical director for the CHRB, sends along numbers that show marked declines in racing and training deaths at all California tracks since they have gone synthetic. Arthur’s numbers say that, during the 2004 and ’05 seasons (before synthetics), the fatality rate was “1 in 445 starts on all surfaces combined at the majors (Bay Meadows, Golden Gate Fields, Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, Oak Tree Racing Assn. at Santa Anita and Del Mar). In ‘07, the rate was 1 in 913 starts on synthetic surfaces.”

But Len Shulman, a writer for the Blood-Horse magazine and a frequent guest on Roger Stein’s racing radio show, used different numbers on a recent broadcast, numbers he said came from the CHRB’s own website and, if accurate, would make synthetic tracks the biggest folly since the Edsel.

He said Hollywood Park lost 19 horses in ‘03, then 25 in ‘04, another 20 each in ’05 and ’06 and, in ’07 after a synthetic track had been put in, lost 20. He said Del Mar, during its terrible summer of ’06 on dirt, lost 19 horses and, on its new Polytrack in ‘07, lost 18.

Those numbers, no longer on the CHRB website, were disputed by Shapiro. He said that Shulman was mixing apples and oranges and maybe a few bananas and went on the air to tell him so. Shulman fired back, falling only slightly short of calling Shapiro a liar.

Stein, in racing for 30 years as a trainer and broadcaster, says, “This is exactly what racing didn’t need. Horse racing is its own worst enemy. Always has been.”

These days, the sun seems to be shining more in Southern California. Also, Santa Anita got a huge boost Thursday with the announcement that the Breeders’ Cup will return there in 2009 for the second straight year.

The Breeders’ Cup has never gone back to back at the same track. Presumably, part of that decision was based on our wonderful weather in late October and early November.

Best guess is that Santa Anita will not be taking that for granted. Expect all Breeders’ Cup tickets printed for the next two years to carry this simple statement:

“Anyone caught doing a rain dance will be removed from the track.”

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com.

For previous columns, go to latimes.com/dwyre.