Horse racing, with its fans and its problems, returns to Bay Area

Trainers try to be extra careful with their horses as fall season at Golden Gate Fields begins.

ALBANY — Early Thursday morning, Steve Sherman leaned on a rail with a stopwatch in his hand and watched Rebel At Heart and Koa Cat gallop five-eighths of a mile down the charcoal-colored track at Golden Gate Fields.

Thursday marked the beginning of the fall racing season at the track, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Sherman, 55, a longtime Bay Area trainer, was running his two thoroughbreds hours before the afternoon’s official program of seven races began, trying to get an indication of which races to enter them in next week.

The scene on a sun-drenched morning at the 81-year-old racetrack has been replayed for decades by men and women embedded in the horse racing industry.

But tensions are running especially high as the fall season begins, with trainers, owners and jockeys — not to mention officials and others who work at the track — on edge after intense scrutiny over a startling number of deaths of horses at Golden Gate Fields and Santa Anita Park in Southern California in the last year. Some have speculated that the controversy might spell the end of the sport in the United States.

“We’re under the microscope,” said Sherman, whose father, Art Sherman, won the 2014 Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes with California Chrome, a horse the elder Sherman trained. “You don’t want to be the guy who causes horse racing to shut down.”

In front of a small midweek crowd in the stands, no horses died at Golden Gate Fields on Thursday.

Trainers and others noted that the opening day does not hold the allure of previous decades.

Still, Desare Kallingal, of Danville, wore a white summer dress and red hat for the occasion. She left the track with a big smile after picking winners in all three races that she placed bets on.

“I picked by the names of the horse,” Kallingal said.

Roz Barclay, an owner and breeder from Auburn, Washington, also was in a celebratory mood after her horse, Northern Rose, won the day’s first race.

“It’s always exciting to see them run” on the first day of the season, Barclay said. “It’s such a long-term project to develop them.”

In the last months, the racing industry has felt the sting of criticism by animal-rights activists who have staged protests at tracks throughout California to draw attention to a business they say mistreats horses, leading to scores of deaths. The attendant publicity has led some lawmakers to champion reforms to racing regulations in an effort to increase track safety.

“Everyone is paranoid,” said Robert Allen, a Canadian who has been training horses in Alberta for 60 years and is running horses at Golden Gate Fields and Del Mar. “One broke down in Del Mar, and it hit the news in 2 seconds.”

The Stronach Group, which owns Golden Gate Fields and Santa Anita Park, has responded by banning some trainers from their California tracks and implementing new policies. In June, the company also banned Bay Area Hall of Fame trainer Jerry Hollendorfer after the fourth thoroughbred under his care died during the winter season at Santa Anita.

Hollendorfer, 73, also was prohibited from racing or stabling horses at Del Mar, but he won a temporary restraining order to allow him to compete at the San Diego racetrack. Hollendorfer filed a complaint this week in Alameda County Superior Court asking for emergency relief so he can race at Golden Gate Fields this season, which ends Sept. 29. A hearing has been scheduled Friday morning in Oakland.

Steve Sherman, a burly man who has won more than 1,000 races since starting his own training business 11 years ago, said he thinks Hollendorfer deserves to return. The advent of social media, he contends, has fueled much of the scrutiny the industry now faces.

Trainers love and care for their horses, he and others said Thursday, and have been unfairly characterized as intentionally harming the animals.

“For them to say we don’t care, we’re butchers, come on,” Steve Sherman said. “Come out in the mornings and see what we do.”

One of Sherman’s horses died last week when it fractured its sesamoid bone during a training session and had to be euthanized.

“It hurts,” he said, declining to provide more details about the death. “It’s a deep wound — like when people have to put down their dogs and cats.”

But he and others in the industry say they are resigned to the fact that injuries will happen and that sometimes those injuries are catastrophic.

Sherman said he sends his horses on less frequent training runs since the attention over the horse deaths at the tracks. Each horse is checked by a personal veterinarian and another from the track, he said. Sherman’s horses that are entered in a given day’s races also jog at sunrise as an extra precaution to make sure they are fit to go.

“You don’t put a little oil in them and keep them going,” Sherman said. “They can hurt themselves overnight.”

Nine horses died at Golden Gate Fields during training and racing in the winter season that ended in June, and 30 horses died at Santa Anita between December 30th and June 23rd, when the season closed. Other tracks in California and around the country also have had high numbers of horse deaths. At Los Alamitos in Orange County, for example, 73 horse deaths after training or racing were reported in the 2008-2009 fiscal year, according to fatality statistics from the California Horse Racing Board. And even Churchill Downs, the site of the Kentucky Derby, has a higher death rate per number of race starts than Santa Anita, according to a database kept by the Jockey Club, the breed registry for all thoroughbreds in the United States.

Allen, 80, was in the backstretch Thursday morning handing out a full-color, 24-page booklet he created that offers his ideas about ways to improve the sport. He wants to ban all pain-killing medications that are given to horses during training and racing. He also wants more equitable payouts to bettors, so that owners and trainers do not feel pressure to push their horses beyond their limits.

“Everyone is so wrapped up in a tradition that they can’t get out of it,” said Allen, who has eight horses here for the Golden Gate series.

Allen, 80, was in the backstretch Thursday morning handing out a full-color, 24-page booklet he created that offers his ideas about ways to improve the sport. He wants to ban all pain-killing medications that are given to horses during training and racing. He also wants more equitable payouts to bettors, so that owners and trainers do not feel pressure to push their horses beyond their limits.

But Allen is an outlier in his views, and he wonders if anyone will listen to him.

“Everyone is so wrapped up in a tradition that they can’t get out of it,” said Allen, who has eight horses here for the Golden Gate series.