Del Mar Paddock © Zoe Metz
86th SUMMER SEASON AT DEL MAR A SMASHING SUCCESS
Once again, the summer meet at Del Mar did not disappoint. From opening day when Game Warrior took down the Oceanside Stakes through today’s G3 Del Mar Juvenile Turf, the races have had full fields and thrilling finishes.
By the end of Sunday’s racing around 16-hundred horses will have raced at the seaside oval this summer, some based in Southern California, others from out of town as indicative of the increased number of horses taking advantage of the ‘Ship & Win’ program this year.
“If you look at it from a 30,000-feet view, I thought it was a strong meet,” racing secretary David Jerkens points out. “There was the consistency of the races filling. I feel like we ran a lot of compelling races on the high levels. I think you need some balance and if you look at our allowance races, they filled consistently and field size in our claiming races was way up.”
There were also the shippers who came in for the weekend and walked out with a trophy and a bundle of cash. Pacific Classic winner Fierceness and G2 Yellow Ribbon winner Heredia were two examples of invaders coming in and helping themselves to a share of Del Mar’s lucrative, record-setting purses.
“The fact that we seemed to draw at least one shipper for just about every stakes race on the weekends, whether it was a Brendan Walsh one weekend or a Graham Motion or Rodolphe Brisset, and obviously the Pacific Classic was one of our most compelling runnings in years.”
Most everyone you speak to about the summer meet point to the Pacific Classic as being the high watermark.
“I think we had stronger cards leading up to the Classic than last year,” Jerkens notes. “The entirety of the week before (the Classic) showed increase in field size from a year ago. Then the Pacific Classic itself got a lot of attention that it didn’t generate last year just because of the participants.
“We were grateful for things working in our favor,” Jerkens adds. “We’re grateful that Fierceness shipped from 3,000 miles away. We’re grateful that Journalism performed. It all added to the entire card and the entire week.”
Other highlights of the meet included jockey Juan Hernandez six wins on August 9; the incredible training job by Phil D’Amato to keep Gold Phoenix in good enough form to win the G2 Del Mar Handicap for a fourth consecutive year. Then to show it was no fluke, he brought his stablemate, Motorious, back to win the G3 Green Flash for a third straight year.
There were the feel good stories of the summer meet: Cal-bred Om N Joy stepping up into open company and winning the G3 Torrey Pines for trainer Aggie Ordonez; Lovesick Blues’ upset win in the G1 Bing Crosby for owner and conditioner Librado Barocio.
Then the dominant performances of Seismic Beauty in the G1 Clement L. Hirsch; Sweet Azteca in the G3 Rancho Bernardo and Citizen Bull in the Shared Belief. Watch for all three to come back to Del Mar for the Breeders’ Cup in the fall.
As for Jerkens and his staff in the Racing Office, it’s time to reboot and prepare for the Bing Crosby fall meet and the Breeders’ Cup six weeks from now.
“We’ll decompress for a brief period,” Jerkens says of him and his staff. “We’ll review, while everything’s fresh in our minds, the summer meet and then start compiling a game plan for the undercard races. That’s pretty much our focus on Breeders’ Cup. I’ll be at Santa Anita for their first weekend. Stall applications will be due. We’ll start to communicate with out-of-state horsemen what we’re offering.”
What they will be offering is an extension of the summer meet. Quality racing, competitive fields and close finishes. The summer season at Del Mar year in and year out continues to offer Thoroughbred racing at its finest. It’s a bar that’s difficult to reach and yet every year seems better than the last. The 86th Del Mar season was no exception.
RACING AT DEL MAR RETURNS WITH THE BREEDERS’ CUP IN OCTOBER
The old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ can easily apply to Del Mar’s Bing Crosby Season that begins on Thursday, October 30 and includes the 42nd running of the Breeders’ Cup World Championships on October 31 and November 1.
This year’s fall meet stakes schedule at Del Mar has been released and it is nearly a carbon copy of last year’s highly-successful Bing Crosby meet.
“I think you don’t change things just for the purpose of changing,” racing secretary David Jerkens says. “If something’s working, why tinker with it. However, there are times when tweaks are necessary.”
The one tweak to this year’s stakes schedule involves the G3 Bayakoa Stakes, which was run as part of the Breeders’ Cup undercard last year. This year it will be moved to the final day of the meet, November 30.
“The fall meet is a short meet consisting of a lot of stakes races especially at the end of the meet,” Jerkens notes. “I feel the fall meet is predicated so much on the reliance of weather cooperating and where we are on the schedule, which is an advantage for us given the lack of other opportunities in that particular time frame in November.”
He’s referring to the suspension of turf racing at racetracks back east like Aqueduct in New York and at Laurel Park in Maryland. Trainers need a place to race their grass horses and the Fall Turf Festival fills that void.
“You do like to have that consistency where people know ‘Okay, the Matriarch is Thanksgiving week,’” Jerkens adds. “When I talk to trainers back east in the summer or the spring, before our summer meet, they’re already thinking of those particular races.”
The stakes action this fall begins opening day with the $100,000 Let It Ride Stakes, won last year by King of Gosford. 19 more stakes will follow, not including the 14 Breeders’ Cup races. $3.15 million in stakes money will be up for grabs during the fall meet, which will be in its 12th year at the seaside oval.
Eleven of the stakes races are graded, the first of which, the G3 Goldikova, will be run as part of the Saturday Breeders’ Cup undercard. Six of the graded stakes will be run during the popular Fall Turf Festival at the end of November.
The G2 Hollywood Turf Cup kicks off the Fall Festival on the Friday after Thanksgiving, November 28. It’s a mile and a half grass marathon for 3-year-olds and up.
There are three graded stakes on the docket for the Saturday portion of the Fall Turf Festival on November 29: The G1 Hollywood Derby for 3-year-olds won last year by Formidable Man; the G2 Seabiscuit Handicap for 3-year-olds and up and the G3 Jimmy Durante for 2-year-old fillies.
Then on Sunday, four stakes races are on tap: the G1 Matriarch for fillies and mares; the G3 Cecil B. DeMille for 2-year-olds; the $100,000 Stormy Liberal, a turf sprint for 3-year-olds and up, and the G3 Bayakoa, a one-mile dirt race for fillies and mares.
It will be a closing day to remember and an appropriate way to wrap up the year’s racing at Del Mar.
CLOSING TIME 2025: LAST CALL FOR ANOTHER SUMMER MEET AT DEL MAR
And poof…just like that the 86th summer season of Thoroughbred racing at Del Mar is over. The number of horses on the backside, over 1,900 at its peak, is beginning to dwindle. Barns without horses to race on this final weekend have already packed up and shipped out.
It was just nine weeks ago they were doing the same thing up at Santa Anita, loading their gear into moving vans and horses onto trailers and heading out to the interstate for the two-to-three-hour drive down to Del Mar. Now it’s time to put it in reverse and move everything and everybody back to Santa Anita or Los Alamitos. For the bigger barns, like Bob Baffert’s and Philip D’Amato’s, the task will take days to complete.
Sunday morning they were rolling up the bath mats and boxing up the office supplies. Half a dozen mid-size Budget moving trucks are parked nearby waiting for assignment.
By this time next week the backside will be empty of horses and the people who care for them, leaving behind just hints of their two-month stay at Del Mar. Where there once was the hustle and bustle of a thriving stable area there will remain a ghost town-like atmosphere.
Gone will be the banter of the grooms and hot walkers as they go about their daily tasks; no longer will you hear the sound of running water as the horses get their morning baths, or the snort and squeal of a contented Thoroughbred enjoying the cool Del Mar weather. Instead, the crows and other birds will move in to do their part in the overall cleanup.
But it’s only temporary. Six weeks from now many will return and the Del Mar Fairgrounds will come alive again. In the racing office preparations are already underway for the upcoming fall meet and the return of the Breeders’ Cup when the best horses in the world move into the vacant stalls and begin preparing for the biggest races of their young lives.
Owners, trainers and jockeys will come back to Del Mar with visions of championships and career-defining moments dancing in their heads and four more weeks of exciting racing will play out again at the place where the turf meets the surf.
COOLING OUT: All the winners in Saturday’s stakes races came back in good order. Jimmy Barnes, assistant to trainer Bob Baffert, who is in Kentucky for this week’s Keeneland Sales, says G1 Del Mar Debutante winner Bottle of Rouge will pack up with the rest of her stablemates and move back to Santa Anita in the coming days. Dreaming of Alys, longshot winner of the Juvenile Fillies Turf, will be pointed to the Surfer Girl at Santa Anita on October 5. And Gimme a Nother, winner of the G2 John C. Mabee, will board a plane on Wednesday and fly back to trainer Graham Motion’s barn at Fair Hill in Maryland toting another Del Mar trophy for her conditioner…Jockeys Flavien Prat and Tyler Gaffalione will ride at Del Mar on Sunday. Prat has six mounts and will be aboard Brant, the heavy favorite in the G1 Del Mar Futurity. Gaffalione also has the call in six races, including Litmus Test in the Futurity…The 41 percent clip at which favorites are winning races at Del Mar this summer is the highest since 1954, in the days when Bill Shoemaker was riding for trainer Red McDaniel. That year favorites won 43 percent of the races…Notable works for Sunday: Express Train (4f, :50.00); Pushiness (4f, :49.80); Seismic Beauty (4f, :49.60); Speed Boat Beach (4f, :49.20); Privman (6f, 1:13.80) and Richi (6f, 1:12.80). A total of 178 horses put in official works at Del Mar on Sunday.