Zenyatta win would merit a citation

Los Angeles Times

Once again, racing giveth and it taketh away. It is alternately the sport of kings and the playground of the pigheaded.

Sunday should be a day of unobstructed joy and pride at Hollywood Park, even if Zenyatta doesn’t do what everybody assumes she will. The unbeaten 6-year-old mare will be attempting to establish a modern-day record for top-echelon thoroughbreds with her 17th straight victory. That would surpass some pretty fast company, namely Cigar and Citation.

All the attention should be on that. This is huge, even if your idea of following horse racing is two hours in front of the TV set every first Saturday in May.

Citation won a Triple Crown in 1948, one of only 11 who have done that, none in the last 32 years. He also won 32 races and finished out of the money only once in 45 races. Cigar won 19 races, finished out of the money only five times and had career winnings of nearly $10 million.

When Cigar went for No. 17 in the streak, in a race in 1996 that was to one-up Citation, TV carried live pictures of his van being escorted to the track at Del Mar. That’s how big a deal it was. A record crowd of 44,181 showed up for the Pacific Classic that day and watched in shock as Siphon and Dramatic Gold drained all the speed out of Cigar with a 1:09 1/5 three-quarters and Alex Solis picked up the pieces and guided Dare and Go past Cigar in the last furlong.

It is unlikely that anywhere near 44,000 will show at Hollywood Park for Zenyatta’s run at the record in the $250,000 Grade I Vanity, a race she has won twice before. With the exception of a Triple Crown race, a Breeders’ Cup or the lure of a day amid the charm of Saratoga or Del Mar, racing seldom attracts those numbers. Even for Zenyatta, who, it should be emphasized, is unbeaten. Citation lost. Cigar lost. So far, not Zenyatta.

Nothing is certain. She is 6, is running a year longer than her owners, Jerry and Ann Moss, had projected she would, and faces incredibly increasing odds that her come-from-way-behind running style can continue to be timed perfectly by Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith.

There has been concern around Hollywood Park that some of her workouts have been below par. Both trainer John Shirreffs and Smith say she is fine.

“Everything is very good, excellent,” Shirreffs says.

Smith, also something for racing to celebrate in the wake of his Belmont victory Saturday aboard the longshot Drosselmeyer, breezed Zenyatta on Monday morning.

“Everything is going great,” he says. “It was a good last breeze.”

Smith says he understands, Belmont victory notwithstanding, how significant this ride on Zenyatta, eight days later, will be.

“I don’t take this lightly,” he says.

Sadly, this is all taking place against a background of curious decision-making in a sport so badly in need of the opposite these days.

Barring an 11th-hour reversal, Hollywood Park will host not only Zenyatta’s historic run at the record, but also this fall’s Oak Tree meeting. Oak Tree is a nonprofit group that has run its short fall meeting at Santa Anita since 1969. Its success has included the last two years of the Breeders’ Cup, to rave reviews. That prompted the Breeders’ Cup board to do research that said holding the roving annual event in one place for five years in a row would be the best way to grow it.

That one place was to be Oak Tree at Santa Anita.

All was fine on April 30. Santa Anita’s owners, a new version of a post-Frank Stronach bankruptcy reorganization, assured Oak Tree its lease would be renewed for this year. Just some T’s to cross and I’s to dot. Fourteen days later, the deal was off and Oak Tree was a homeless tenant, looking for a place to bunk.

The likelihood now is that Oak Tree will take its annual fall meeting to Hollywood Park this year, and on to Del Mar in the future as a permanent home. Since the California Horse Racing Board is much more likely to award racing dates to Oak Tree than to Stronach and his Canadian cronies, the Great Race Place, which was to have five straight Breeders’ Cups starting in 2011, will now have the sounds of silence.

Horse racing is a $4-billion industry in California. It employs 50,000. One CHRB official estimated that the Breeders’ Cup brought $60 million in annual economic activity.

Oak Tree has set its deadline at July 1 to know where it will rest its head. Stronach is scheduled to address a CHRB monthly meeting June 22 at Hollywood Park.

As one local racing official put it, “They better have a big room.”

Hopefully, Zenyatta will draw better Sunday.

bill.dwyre@latimes.com