The Kubler-Ross model says there are five stages of grief, with acceptance serving as the final one.

When horse racing is involved, I’d argue the model is backwards. It’s very, very easy to accept a beloved circuit or institution dying because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to expect.

The latest toll of the bell came for the Northern California racing fairs. Long prominent parts of the summer and fall calendar, seasons at Pleasanton, Sacramento, Ferndale, and Fresno will not be conducted by the California Authority of Racing Fairs in 2025.

This announcement, which came Tuesday, was predictable. The Golden State Racing fall meet at Pleasanton didn’t come close to meeting the numbers put up by Golden Gate Fields, which was shuttered by The Stronach Group (more on them later) in June of 2024. Golden State Racing declined to apply for dates in early-2025, and even though Pleasanton still operates as a training center (for the moment), many horses and horsepeople went elsewhere.

The ability to see this news coming, however, doesn’t make it any less painful.

I wrote about the fair circuit being a breath of fresh air last month. I started freelancing in Pleasanton in 2019, and have co-hosted handicapping seminars outside the grandstand for the past several summers. The crowds were kind, the people who worked at the track busted their butts, and the atmosphere blending racing fans with families enjoying everything the fair had to offer was as pleasant as I’ve ever experienced at a horse racing venue.

When Golden Gate Fields closed, the fairs put forth a plan to house year-round racing at Pleasanton. The Stronach Group, which had never been a fan of CARF to begin with, responded by threatening to sell Santa Anita. Apparently, if they didn’t want to conduct racing in Northern California, nobody else should’ve been allowed to do so, either.

Objectively, this entire scenario did not have to happen. Golden Gate Fields may not have been an “A track,” but it generated roughly $3 million in handle per day. The land it sits on is valuable, yes, but it occupies parts of Berkeley and Albany, which makes selling and repurposing it very difficult for zoning purposes. One can’t simply buy the land, tear down the track, and build high-priced condos, but that didn’t stop The Stronach Group from putting these events into motion and trying to close as early as December of 2023.

The theory was that California could no longer support two circuits, and gathering all horses in Southern California would boost the product at Santa Anita. A bit more than a month after Pleasanton’s final race, we can deduce this never held water. Santa Anita’s product is still struggling, and Northern California horses, which had been running against slower stock, have mostly been non-factors in races against their SoCal counterparts. Plans to add an extra day of racing each week and capitalize on an increased headcount of horses have yet to come to fruition, and Northern California horsepeople are, predictably, bitter about promises they say haven’t been kept by the state racing industry’s governing bodies.

This is preferable to the previous status quo…how, exactly? This has hurt a lot of good people, from NorCal racing fans left without a circuit to follow to horsepeople that now have to ply their trades on other circuits (some of which aren’t exactly on stable ground, either). Golden Gate Fields wasn’t on life support, and neither were the fairs. Northern California horse racing didn’t pass away of natural causes. It was murdered.

The Stronach Group’s own tracks have their issues, of course. In a highly-publicized disaster in the making, Gulfstream Park’s horsepeople are being strong-armed into backing decoupling legislation, with only the vague, unwritten promise of support to keep racing at the property going into 2028. In an interview on Pegasus Day, Belinda Stronach said that having racing in an urban environment was not ideal.

(The presence of dozens of other tracks worldwide in major cities would seem to act as an ideal fact-check. However, it doesn’t seem like that matters much to her at the moment.)

Meanwhile, other circuits seem to be hanging by threads. Arizona’s sole operating track, Turf Paradise, battles rumors of closing every few years. Texas horse racing cut back its purses and total race count significantly after several years of resistance against HISA (and, by extension, several years of out-of-state American players not being able to bet on the product). Even New York, which boasts a stable industry, has condensed from three tracks to two and will close Aqueduct when the new Belmont Park opens in 2026.

Again, though, the grim reaper’s ability to come for tracks at any moment is something we’re apparently just supposed to accept, as is the lack of accountability for those who have forced the sport into these situations. We accept this because there’s no alternative we can pursue. We’re supposed to cry for a bit and then, to steal a phrase from the horse racing Twitter crowd, shut up and bet.

In something that, I’m sure, will surprise no one (from the degenerates who think I’m a suit, to the suits who think I’m a degenerate), there’s no shutting up happening here. The fairs didn’t have to die. Unnecessary turmoil, gross mismanagement within the industry, and petty politics took away a source of joy for so many people, not to mention one of the lowest “barriers to entry” at any horse racing venue in the country.

Acceptance is easy, because given those involved in this saga, a terrible end was predictable. The second step of that “five stages of grief” model, however, is anger. That’s the stage that will be toughest to get past.