Zenyatta to parade at Hollywood Park; dirt track ready for Santa Anita meeting

Sunday might be as significant a day as there has been in Southern California horse racing.

It is subtle. There is a Grade II race at Hollywood Park, the $150,000 Bayakoa Handicap. That’s business as usual. The Triple Crown season is well behind us, as is the Breeders’ Cup. And the local run of headliner races, such as the Santa Anita Handicap and Derby, the Hollywood Gold Cup and the Pacific Classic, are mere distant thoughts for a new year.

Sunday is a big deal because of Zenyatta and dirt. Not necessarily in that order.

Zenyatta will make her last appearance in Southern California when she is paraded between the sixth and seventh races at Hollywood Park. The next day, she will be on a plane to Kentucky, where she will live and hope to become a mother.

Suddenly, Barn 55 South at Hollywood Park will be quiet. For months, it has been a tourist stop and photo shoot. The public has come to see this fabled female up close, and trainer John Shirreffs has opened his arms to it. If Zenyatta could have signed autographs, she’d have serious hoof cramps right now.

Without the buzz Zenyatta gave her sport, from even before she won the Breeders’ Cup Classic in 2009, one shudders to think what additional damage racing might have suffered to prestige and bottom line.

Now, she will be gone. Certainly never forgotten.

But there is a new horizon, and Santa Anita is it.

The Great Race Place is 22 days from its annual major meet opening the day after Christmas, and it will be anything but business as usual.

The dirt is in. Owner Frank Stronach’s new racing surface is finished. It cost $3.5 million, which is on top of the $25 million Santa Anita has spent to tear out its old dirt three years ago, put in the California Horse Racing Board’s mandated synthetic surface, maintain and repair that and keep it cobbled together through several weather crises.

Sunday, horsemen can start moving their thoroughbreds into Santa Anita’s barns. Monday, they can let their expensive and fragile equine athletes go out and play in the dirt. Most of the trainers are thrilled. The horses are withholding comment until after their works.

“It’s like the dirt in the good old days, the 1930s and ‘40s,” says trainer Bruce Headley, who at 76 can speak from personal experience.

The project was led by Ted Malloy, in coordination with Jason Spetnagel and Rich Tedesco. They started Oct. 11, and it has been night and day. At one point, 90 trucks waited in line to dump materials. Malloy says every inch has been processed and carefully screened.

“If you can find a rock on this track,” he says, “I’ll eat it.”

Santa Anita’s Dec. 26 opening is characterized by its president, George Haines, as something “more like a grand opening.”

Southern California’s musical chairs of track-surfacing is well known because it is so recent. After a particularly disastrous session of horse injuries and breakdowns at Del Mar in 2006, the CHRB mandated that all California tracks under its sanction tear out their dirt surfaces and install synthetics. That was done in Southern California at Del Mar, Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. Los Alamitos shrugged and ignored the edict.

The results were mixed at best. Horses still broke down in similar numbers to their days on dirt. But horsemen soon saw an onset of rear-leg injuries on the synthetics they say they never saw before.

“Rear ankles, tendons,” Headley says. “I’ve been in this since the late 1940s, and in that time, I’ve seen three or four like that on the dirt. When the synthetics came, I had one period where I had 28 [horses] out with some sort of rear leg injury from one of the three tracks.”

Although Santa Anita and Stronach have acted, neither Hollywood Park nor Del Mar is likely to follow quickly. Hollywood Park is owned by a land development company whose future investments are more likely to be in real estate than in dirt. Del Mar is owned by the state and would not put itself in a good light for taxpayers by ripping up and redoing after only three years.

Now, Santa Anita is out there by itself and happy about it.

Haines says individual and group ticket sales are way up and that his staff has been fielding “around 100 phone calls a day” from eager fans. He says he is sensing pent-up interest for racing to resume at a track that has been dark since April 19 — the longest spell since 1968, which was the year before Oak Tree opened its annual fall meeting.

Sunday is a new day for racing in Southern California. It leaves just one question:

Just how fast might Zenyatta have run on Santa Anita’s new dirt?

bill.dwyre@latimes.com