DEL MAR — The sport of horse racing, which has seemed rumpled and stained for years, will dress up in its Sunday best tomorrow. It will be time for sport coats, summer dresses and the Pacific Classic at Del Mar, the $1-million race that is grandiose in both purse size and location.
For 69 years, since singer Bing Crosby and actor Pat O'Brien borrowed on their life insurance policies to open a racetrack about 20 miles north of San Diego, Del Mar has been sort of a West Coast Woodstock for the wealthy and wide-eyed. Its motto, the one it began with, is one of the most recognizable in sports: Where the surf meets the turf. No big ad agency needed here.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday August 22, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Del Mar: An article in Saturday's Section A on thoroughbred racing stated that the horse that won the first-ever race at Del Mar was named High Stakes. The correct name is High Strike.
Del Mar opened its season on a Wednesday, July 19. The crowd was 42,005, the second-largest ever here behind the Pacific Classic Day in 1996, when 44,186 showed up to see if Cigar could break the legendary Citation's 16-race win streak.
He couldn't. Dare And Go, ridden by Alex Solis, won.
And there was Solis, on opening day, 10 years later, the star of the show again, winning three times, including both divisions of the featured Oceanside Stakes.
"You get a crowd like today," Solis said, "and it really gets your heart pumping."
It was wild, festive, a throwback to the days when horse racing's big days had a Super Bowl feel and the track, any major track, was the place to be. By 11 a.m., three hours before post time, the grounds were buzzing. By 1, they had become a human logjam, and by race time, they had become a leading spot on the planet for Brooks Brothers shirts, little black dresses and daytime cleavage.
The sights were not lost on Joe Harper, the 63-year-old grandson of Cecil B. DeMille, who has been the chief executive of the Del Mar racetrack since 1978.
"I go to the Academy Awards every year," Harper said, "and our opening day is better."
But racing cannot subsist alone on Del Mar and on a similar highly successful meeting each year at Saratoga in upstate New York. Nor can it seem to translate its Triple Crown of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, plus its annual one day of million dollar-plus purses called the Breeders' Cup, into the robust industry it once was before other pro sports, the Internet and cable television made trips through traffic to the betting windows a much lower priority.
