Santa Anita winter-spring meeting scheduled to open Sunday

The rain was unrelenting.

All week long it swept in never-ending sheets across Arcadia and — more important from the horsemen’s standpoint — across the city’s fabled Santa Anita racetrack.

It continued day after dismal day, quickly turning the Great Race Place into the Great Rain Place ahead of Sunday’s opening of the track’s 74th winter-spring meeting.

It was remorseless, and more is on the way.

Wednesday was the worst. That’s when a pelting series of storms brought the recent rainfall total to a soggy 13 1/2 inches and raised doubts about whether the opening would take place as planned.

The barn area became a quagmire, causing trainers and jockeys, grooms and stable hands to tread almost as carefully as the high-priced thoroughbreds housed there.

“Really muddy, sloppy, sloppy, sloppy,” said John Sadler, the track’s top trainer in the last two seasons and president of the California Thoroughbred Trainers group.

Still, after an earlier storm 10 days ago, one former jockey dismissed the dreary downpour.

“I don’t think it’ll faze” the track, which drains well, said retired Hall of Fame rider Eddie Delahoussaye, comfortable in the knowledge that it would not be him desperately switching goggles in mid-race, trying to clear his vision of mud and dirt.

Ah, yes, the dirt.

Dirt is very much the story on the opening day of this Santa Anita meeting. Fifty-thousand tons of the stuff — 90% dirt and 10% clay — were hauled in from such spots as Irwindale and Corona to replace the synthetic track that made up the main racing surface for the last three years.

The racetrack was closed for eight months, the longest spell in 42 years, while the switch was made. The fall Oak Tree Meeting was moved to Hollywood Park. Santa Anita has not heard a call to the post since April 18.

Small wonder Sunday is being touted as a homecoming of sorts for some of the nation’s top trainers, jockeys and horses, and that fingers are being kept crossed from the boardroom to the barns. A lot is riding on this meeting.

The new surface is said to be “kind,” but that does not obscure the fact that a Jockey Club study released Dec. 15 revealed that for every 1,000 starts, there are 2.14 horse fatalities on dirt compared with 1.74 on turf and 1.55 on artificial surfaces. The study was based on analysis of 754,932 starts over the last two years.

Still, the reviews on Santa Anita’s new “natural” surface have been positive.

“Horses just glide over it,” Delahoussaye said in a pre-storm Santa Anita in-house interview. “I think it’s better than the dirt we had before.”

“The horses looked like they moved on it very well,” Sadler said.

But all the rain caused sleepless nights for those charged with making the new surface better than any before. No one knew Friday what Sunday would bring.

“It’s a brand-new toy,” Sadler said. “What the exact conditions are on opening day, not having run a race on it, those are the intangibles.”

Sadler will be sending out the favorites in the day’s two Grade I races. He has Switch taking on another 12 horses in the $250,000 La Brea Stakes, while Twirling Candy is the top pick in a field of 11 for the $250,000 Malibu Stakes.

Trainers think Santa Anita made the correct call in sealing the track during the downpour and limiting its use. “They kept the track closed, which was really smart,” Sadler said. “We were allowed to train on the training track.

“Some of the horses’ preparation has been a little less than ideal going into opening day, but everybody’s pretty much in the same boat.”

It was Florida-based Ted Malloy’s job to oversee the multimillion-dollar resurfacing project — and all went well until the storms began last weekend.

“Every day it was rain, rain, rain, rain, rain,” Malloy said Friday, when the sunshine finally returned to help dry things out.

“Today was super; we probably worked 300 horses” on the main track, he said. “I never heard an uncomplimentary word today. Now we have to worry about what’s going to happen [Saturday] night.”

The winter-spring meeting, which runs until April 17, comes with several story lines. Jockey Garrett Gomez’s pursuit this week of a fifth consecutive money-earned title is one of them. He is in a close race with Ramon Dominguez and John Velasquez. Also, having won the last three riding titles on the synthetic track, jockey Rafael Bejarano will be seeking to make it four in a row on dirt this season.

Then, too, the new surface probably will bring more quality horses from the East ahead of the May 7 Kentucky Derby. Soon, Sadler hopes, the talk will all be about racing.

“We want to get the conversation off the surface and about the horses,” he said. “If we learned any lessons from last year, it’s that what motivates fans is Zenyatta.

“The horses, the jockeys, the trainers, the fans. That’s where the emphasis should be.”

But the threat of rain on Sunday still troubles Malloy.

“It bothers me and I have a hard time sleeping,” he said, “but we’re going to live with it, no matter what happens. We’ll give them the best surface that we can, weather permitting.

“We’ll do all we can do to make it safe. If it’s not safe, I wouldn’t let them race.”

grahame.jones@latimes.com