The Alameda County Fair opens Friday. For most of the next month, those in Northern California can stop by to enjoy concerts, rides, fried food, and the general…well, fair fare.

What we won’t see, for the second straight summer, is the use of the oldest one-mile dirt track in America. Thoroughbred races in Northern California, of course, haven’t been contested since the fall of 2024.

I wrote about this when it happened, and time hasn’t healed the wounds. As if to throw salt in those wounds, Santa Anita Park’s “end of the meet” press release cited strong handle and attendance. The popular refrain when Northern California racing was “consolidated” was that doing so would save the product in the south.

Before we go much further, a necessary series of reminders: I moved west to work at Santa Anita in 2013. It’s one of the few remaining cathedrals in horse racing, a sport that’s unquestionably better when Santa Anita is humming. Without that move, lots of things change for me, both personally and professionally, and not in a positive way. For those reasons, and a few others, I want Santa Anita to succeed.

Having said that, I’ve looked at the numbers. For what they are, they’re…fine. However, there wasn’t nearly as much as there could have been.

Golden Gate Fields, at the time of its closing, handled roughly $3 million per day. Those were the expectations hoisted upon the ill-fated Golden State Racing venture, which ran Pleasanton in the fall of 2024. When the racing product didn’t meet those expectations (getting to a bit over $1 million per day by the end of the meet after a very rough start), future meets were doomed.

In 2024-25, the first Santa Anita meet without Northern California “competition,” handle rose 10 percent from 2023-24, and field size saw a five-percent bump. It’s…something, but it’s not a full absorption of the Golden Gate handle, by any means. This past meet, all-sources handle remained consistent. Per Horse Racing Nation, average daily handle topped $9 million for the sixth consecutive season. “Consistent” is good, but it shows the closure of Golden Gate Fields and the other NorCal tracks wasn’t the shot in the arm it was sold as.

This prompts a few questions, the first being…where did that Golden Gate handle actually go? The new “B-circuit” for Southern California is in Arizona, but while Turf Paradise’s renovations and upgrades have gotten rave reviews, a May Thoroughbred Daily News article says all-sources handle was up just one percent in a year-over-year comparison.

When Northern California ceased racing, Santa Anita officials made multiple public statements that included promises to NorCal horsepeople. They promised to run races for horses who had been stabled on that circuit, and they delivered on that promise…for a few months. After the first few months of the 2024-25 meet, those races disappeared. Many horses and horsepeople went to other locales (such as Emerald Downs, which had a fantastic 2025 season by basically absorbing handle left behind by the fair tracks), and remaining thoroughbreds from the former “B-circuit” that now had to go against top-tier stock generally ran like…well, horses from a former “B-circuit” that now had to go against top-tier stock.

Santa Anita also boasted that the influx of horses would even allow a return to four-day weeks at the Great Race Place. This never materialized.

Finally, while this provided a slight boost to numbers, consolidating racing to one circuit didn’t solve many of the biggest problems pertaining to California’s industry. Farms in the state aren’t breeding as many horses. Races in the state aren’t funded by subsidies or aided by other arms of the gambling industry. It’s hard to ship horses west to compete, and purses for certain races just aren’t what they are in equal-stature races elsewhere in the country.

I’ve made no secret that Pleasanton was my adopted home track (the folks at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame even enlisted me to write about the fairs in “The Racetracks of America,” something I’ll always be proud of). In a sport where it’s hard to be a fan sometimes, Pleasanton and other fair tracks like Santa Rosa, Fresno, and Ferndale made it easy (Sacramento, not so much; I’m sorry, but that place was a furnace in the summer). With all due respect to tracks like Saratoga, which have plenty of draws for kids and newbies to be introduced to the game we love, there was no lower barrier to entry for fans anywhere in the country than at Northern California fair tracks.

My friend Dennis Miller, with whom I co-hosted daily handicapping seminars outside the Pleasanton grandstand, wrote an article for a local publication this week. It featured some notes from a chat he had with owner, breeder, and NorCal racing ambassador George Schmitt, a truly great guy. The article expresses reason for optimism, which is rare in this industry of late.

Should something materialize at Pleasanton and other fair tracks in the northern part of the Golden State, nobody will be happier about it than yours truly. All of this, however, begs a final, damning question…with a year and a half of hindsight, what good did the cessation of horse racing in Northern California actually do for anything that matters?

If anyone can come up with a positive answer, I’d love to hear it.