Golden Gate Fields timeline: Even before 1941 to 2024

Albany, Calif.

Golden Gate Fields was not the first development on 140
acres of land nestled against the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay. In the last
200 years it has been a commercial public ranch, a last stop for beef cattle, a
dynamite factory that literally exploded into financial oblivion, a mud bed for
clamming and a dry dock for part of the U.S. Navy fleet in World War II.

What it will be next remains to be seen. What it will not be
anymore is the active racetrack that it has been for most of the past 83 years.
The Stronach Group closed it Sunday, 11 months after news broke that it was
consolidating its West Coast racing operation at Santa Anita.

The racing history of that parcel of land straddling Albany
and Berkeley has been dotted with colorful successes, disappointments and
oddities. Highlights are detailed here, gleaned from histories written about
the track and contemporaneous reports dating to the Great Depression.

June 27, 1933. Thanks to a 63 percent vote of state
voters on proposition 3, horse racing and pari-mutuel betting were legalized in
California.

Nov. 27, 1939. Ground was broken on Fleming Point for the building of
Golden Gate Fields. With singer Bing Crosby among the board members of the
Golden Gate Turf Club, architect Maury Diggs oversaw construction of the $2.5
million track to mirror his design work at nearby Bay Meadows.

Feb. 1, 1941. Postponed more than one month because
of a wet winter, what was intended to be a 35-day meet finally began on a rainy
day at Golden Gate Fields. Shookumchuck, bred by singer Bing Crosby and ridden
by apprentice jockey Eddie Franklin, won the first race. The meet lasted only
five days and was abandoned after the original cushion eroded, and the dirt
track was washed away.

July 11, 1941. With ongoing trouble with the racing
surface and swimming in $500,000 of debt, Golden Gate Fields was declared
bankrupt and auctioned off for $1,000. After the U.S. was drawn five months
later into World War II, the track property was converted by the military into a
naval landing-force equipment depot, where hundreds of ships and submarines
were dry-docked in preparation for deployment in the Pacific.

Sept. 9, 1947. For the first time in six years, races
were run at Golden Gate Fields. The track reopened under the aegis of the
Pacific Turf Club.

Oct. 4, 1947. Fair Truckle went six furlongs in
1:08.4 one race before Count Speed ran 1 1/16 miles in 1:41.0. The two times
were world records.

April 20, 1949. Bill Shoemaker, a 19-year-old bug
boy, rode Shafter V to a win the day’s second race at Golden Gate Fields. It
was the first of 8,833 victories in a Hall of Fame career before Shoe’s
retirement in 1990.

June 24, 1950. Deep-closing 5-year-old horse Noor
defeated 1948 Triple Crown champion Citation by three lengths in the $57,000
Golden Gate Handicap. Bred in Ireland by the Aga Khan III and campaigned by
Seabiscuit’s owner Charles Howard, Noor set a world record with a time of
1:58.2 for the 1 1/4 miles. He defeated Citation four times that year,
including one week earlier on the same track in the 1 1/8-mile Forty-Niners
Handicap.

June 5, 1954. The Pacific Turf Club began its gradual
acquisition of Bay Meadows.

Sept. 29, 1954. Stewards turned down trainer Jimmy
Jones’s request to scratch Dixie Lad from the $5,000 Millbrae Handicap.
Carrying odds of 14-1, Dixie Lad then won the 1 1/16-mile race.

May 2, 1955. A plot to shoot jockey Johnny Longden
was determined by police investigators to have been a hoax. The threat had been
phoned in anonymously the previous week to Golden Gate steward George
Schilling. Bodyguards provided by the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau
were at Longden’s side for days.

Dec. 7, 1957. In his usual, deep-closing style, Silky
Sullivan made up 27 lengths to get his first stakes win in the $25,000 Golden
Gate Futurity. His jockey Manuel Ycaza, a Panama native who earned his second
U.S. stakes victory, told the San Francisco Examiner, “I love him like a
son. He is a nice machine.”

Feb. 22, 1962. William Gilmore, who owned Golden Gate
Fields and Tanforan Racetrack close by in San Bruno, died at his vacation home
near Grass Valley, Calif.

July 31, 1964. After closing the previous fall,
Tanforan burned down. Dates for the track that opened in 1899 had been
transferred 10 miles south to Bay Meadows.

April 3, 1969. San Francisco native Robyn Smith broke
a gender barrier when she became the first woman to ride in a Northern
California horse race. Swifty Yorky placed second in the third race of a
Thursday card at Golden Gate. Smith later married actor-dancer Fred Astaire.

Feb. 22, 1972. A turf course was opened inside the
main track at Golden Gate Fields.

March 5, 1977. What was called a modern-day record
26,109 fans showed up to see riding sensation Steve Cauthen, 16, paired with 8-5
favorite Make Amends in what turned out to be a last-place finish among the 11
horses in the $150,000 California Derby. Despite that, Cauthen and his agent
Lenny Goodman enjoyed an unprecedented $6 million year. In 1978 Cauthen would
team with Affirmed to become the youngest jockey to win the Triple Crown.

Feb. 7, 1980. Thanks to the new American Tote 300,
Golden Gate Fields became the first track to offer customers the option of
doing all their business with the same clerk. Before that, betting and cashing
were done at separate windows.

May 6, 1984. En route to his second horse-of-the-year
award, future Hall of Fame gelding John Henry carried jockey Chris McCarron to a
1 3/8-mile turf-course record of 2:13.0 in winning the Golden Gate Handicap.

Feb. 5, 1990. Ron Hansen, a well-known Northern
California jockey, was banned from Golden Gate Fields after he was accused of
trying to bribe another rider. The suspension was provoked after racebooks at
the Desert Inn and Stardust in Las Vegas reported betting irregularities at Bay
Meadows.

March 13, 1990. Saying a bribery claim could not be
proven, the CHRB ordered Golden Gate Fields to let Hansen compete again.

April 16, 1992. Russell Baze became the first jockey
to ride seven winners on a single card in Northern California when he
accomplished the feat at Golden Gate.

Oct. 3, 1993. About 14 hours after riding at Bay
Meadows in what turned out to be his final race, Hansen, 33, ran his Jaguar
into the back of another car on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. He ran away from
the high-speed crash and disappeared.

Jan. 24, 1994. Hansen’s decomposed body was found in
a bayside marsh in Hayward, Calif. The Alameda County coroner never could come
up with a cause of death. There eventually were reports that Hansen may have
been part of a federal investigation into a race-fixing ring and that he might
have been the victim of a mob hit. The FBI confirmed to the San Francisco
Chronicle that there was an investigation, but it did not provide any
details.

March 26, 1997. U.K.-based bookmaking business Ladbroke
Racing, a subsidiary of Hilton Group, announced it was buying Golden Gate
Fields. Ladbroke had been leasing the track from Catellus Development in the
eight years since the Pacific Racing Association ceded management.

Nov. 5, 1999. As part of the liquidation of all its
international gaming properties in the Americas and South Africa, Ladbroke
announced it would sell Golden Gate Fields to Frank Stronach’s Canada-based
Magna International for $77 million. This came nearly a year after Stronach
bought Santa Anita.

Jan. 22, 2005. A gate-to-wire ride on Hollow Memories
gave Russell Baze his fourth victory of the day and ran his win total to 8,834,
one more than longtime North America record holder Bill Shoemaker for what was
then second on the career list among jockeys.

Sept. 17, 2006. Lost in the Fog, whose winning debut at
Golden Gate in 2004 presaged his sprint championship in 2005, was euthanized
after he was diagnosed with cancerous tumors in his spleen. He was buried on
the infield of the track where his career began.

Nov. 7, 2007. Golden Gate Fields christened its new
Tapeta synthetic surface to replace the dirt track. The change was ordered by
the CHRB, which also called for all-weather tracks at Santa Anita, Hollywood
Park and Del Mar.

Feb. 1, 2008. After a five-minute wait to get a
verdict on the win photo, Two Step Cat’s was declared the victor in the third
race of a Friday card at Golden Gate Fields. That made Russell Baze the first
jockey in North America to amass 10,000 victories. He reached the milestone 23
days after world-record holder Jorge Ricardo got there in Argentina.

Aug. 17, 2008. After 74 years, Bay Meadows in San
Mateo, Calif., hosted its final day of racing, leaving Golden Gate Fields as
the only major racetrack in the Bay Area. Demolition began the following month,
but the pile of debris remained until it finally was cleared the next year to
make way for a residential and commercial development.

Jan. 12, 2010. Seven weeks before it was scheduled to
be sold at a bankruptcy auction, Golden Gate Fields was transferred from Magna
Entertainment to MI Developments, both owned by Frank Stronach. It was part of
a $75 million reorganization settlement that included Santa Anita, Gulfstream
Park, AmTote and Xpressbet in the move.

July 3, 2011. Golden Gate Fields, Santa Anita and
Gulfstream Park were transferred formally to The Stronach Group, which does business
now under the name 1/ST.

June 12, 2016. Dreamcatcher finished fifth in the
eighth race, a $62,500 optional-claiming allowance test covering one mile on
the Golden Gate turf. It was the last time together for trainer Jerry
Hollendorfer and jockey Russell Baze, who rode two more races that Sunday
before retiring. They were far and away the most successful trainer-jockey
combination in the track’s history.

April 2, 2020. Shortly after the onset of the COVID
pandemic, the public-health department of Alameda County ordered Golden Gate
Fields to stop racing. Spectators already had been locked out of the track
since March 12. Racing would not resume until May 14.

March 4, 2021. Almira Tanner, Jamie Crom, Omar
Aicardi and Rocky Chau, animal-rights activists from a group calling itself
Direct Action Everywhere, lit purple flares, fastened themselves together with
interlocking pipes and sprawled on the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. The
protest that was broken up late in the afternoon by police forced the
cancellation of one race and pushing six others back to that night. The San
Jose Mercury-News said 17 protesters lined up at the entrance to the track,
forcing Berkeley’s health department to cancel 200 appointments for COVID
vaccinations that were being provided in a parking-lot facility.

July 16, 2023. The Stronach Group scrambled to
confirm John Cherwa’s story in the Los Angeles Times that Golden Gate
Fields would be closed permanently Dec. 19 with all the company’s West Coast
racing resources directed to Southern California. Stronach executives said
Golden Gate had been losing money for years and that it saw no viable financial
future for the track.

Sept. 21, 2023. After lawmakers approved what
amounted to a Stronach Group request to send simulcast dollars to Southern
California on dates when there was no racing in the north, the California Horse
Racing Board approved dates that would keep Golden Gate Fields open until early
June.

March 21, 2024. The CHRB voted 6-0 to approve a new
26-day fall meet at Pleasanton to help fill the void left by the closing of
Golden Gate Fields. The board said it would wait until summer to license Golden
State Racing, the new organization being formed by the California Association
of Racing Fairs.

June 9, 2024. More than 83 years after it staged its
first card, Golden Gate Fields hosted its final race.