DEL MAR, Calif.— On Thursday, July 23, I drove thirty minutes up the coast to the Del Mar Racetrack for a Day at the Races hosted by the Horse Racing Women's Association.

I am a San Diego native, and I had never been. That is not much of a confession, because I would guess most of the people I grew up with haven't either. Del Mar has always simply been up there, doing whatever it does every July — a hat contest, a thing somebody's parents are into. I knew the track was old and I knew it was expensive and I knew essentially nothing else. I did not know what a furlong was (more on furlongs later, but for now, know that it’s one eighth of a mile). I did not know what happens to a racehorse when it stops racing. I was not sure whether I was walking into a sporting event, a fundraiser or a garden party, and by the end of the afternoon I had a reasonable case for all three.

Check-in opened at noon in the Directors' Room, five floors up and decorated in burgundy. I gave my name at the table, was handed a goodie bag, and was told a little more about how the day would run. Inside the bag: a white snapback hat that said HORSES in all caps across the front, a handbag cleaning kit, and a sticker for an organization called CARMA. I did not know what CARMA was. Finding out turned out to be one of the most interesting things that I learned that afternoon.

The Horse Racing Women's Association (HRWA) was founded in 2022, out of a summit at Santa Anita Park that drew enough women from enough corners of the sport to become something permanent. It now runs an annual conference and a series of Day at the Races events at tracks across the U.S. and Canada, built around three stated aims: to engage, elevate and invest in women in horse racing. The Del Mar day benefited HRWA's Pay It Forward Program, which exists so that the cost of a ticket isn't what keeps a woman out of a room like this one.

I found a seat, ordered a margarita, and started talking to the people at my table. There were appetizers set out, and at the far end of each table a small television, because you cannot see the track from a seated position in the Directors' Room. You can see the mountains and a great deal of sky. To watch a race you either stand up and walk to the rail or you watch it on a screen from three hundred feet above the horses.

What I had not registered, until I was sitting five floors above it with a drink in my hand, was how much history I had spent my whole life driving past.

A Brief History of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club

The track exists because a La Jolla man named William Quigley watched Santa Anita open on Christmas Day of 1934 and decided San Diego deserved a racetrack, too. He took the idea to Bing Crosby, and in May of 1936 the two of them founded the Del Mar Turf Club, backed by a partnership that included Pat O'Brien, Gary Cooper, Joe E. Brown and Oliver Hardy. The grounds themselves belong to the State of California and are run by the 22nd District Agricultural Association, the same state agency that puts on the San Diego County Fair. Quigley managed the racetrack until his death at forty-nine in 1942. When the gates opened for the first time in 1937, Crosby stood at them to personally greet the first fan through.

The place made its name fast. On August 12, 1938, Del Mar hosted a $25,000 winner-take-all match race between Seabiscuit and a colt named Ligaroti. Twenty thousand people came. NBC carried it live, making it the first thoroughbred race ever broadcast nationwide on radio, at a time when horse racing ranked second only to Major League Baseball in American popularity. Seabiscuit, under George "The Iceman" Woolf and carrying 130 pounds, beat Ligaroti and Noel Richardson at 115 by a nose. By 1940 the track had become a summer playground for the Hollywood elite including Dorothy Lamour, W.C. Fields, Ava Gardner, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Betty Grable, Mickey Rooney. Jimmy Durante came so often that the track eventually named its turf course after him.

Then, it stopped. From 1942 through 1944 the meet went dark and the grounds were handed to the war effort, first as a training site for the Marines, then as a manufacturing facility for B-17 bomber parts. When Japan surrendered and President Truman declared a national holiday for August 15, 1945, more than twenty thousand people turned out at Del Mar and bet $958,476, a track record at the time. The Santa Fe Railroad started running a "racetrack special" down from Los Angeles, and cheering its arrival became a local ritual. A young rider out of Texas named Bill “Willie” Shoemaker won 52 races at the 1949 meet and became the first apprentice to take the track's riding title; five years later he won 94 races in a single 41-day season, a Del Mar standard nobody has been able to touch. In 1955 an Argentine filly named Cipria won a maiden race by a head and paid $263.40 on a $2 win ticket, still the largest payout in the track's history.

Crosby made one last visit in 1977 and died of a heart attack later that year, leaving behind a recording of "Where the Turf Meets the Surf" that still plays over the grandstand. The infield opened to the public in 1985. The first $1 million Pacific Classic ran in 1991 and was won by a hometown horse, Best Pal, after which the wrecking ball took the old grandstand and an $80 million replacement went up in its place. The main track has been dirt, then Polytrack, then dirt again. Del Mar has hosted the Breeders' Cup four times now.

Today the track is a one-mile oval with a capacity of 44,000, the second-largest racing venue in the western United States behind Santa Anita, and it is in the middle of its 89th season that comprises thirty-two race days running from July 17 through Labor Day, thirty-seven stakes races carrying $7.775 million in purses, six of them Grade 1, plus a $1 million Pacific Classic on August 22. It has also, according to injury rates in the national Equine Injury Database maintained by The Jockey Club and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, been ranked among the safest major racetracks in North America for eight consecutive years. That last statistic is not one I had ever encountered, and I will come back to why that matters.

The HRWA Programming

The first item on the agenda was a panel the HRWA called HerWay Talk. The panel ran about forty-five minutes. There were four panelists with Christy Halling of Halling Thoroughbreds moderating: Carla Gaines, a multiple graded stakes-winning trainer; Connie Broge, who coordinates the winner's circle for the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club; Lucinda Lovitt, executive director of the California Retirement Management Account; and Lucy Lawrence, an owner, breeder and board member of the California Thoroughbred Horsemen's Foundation. Four women, four entirely different jobs, one sport.

Lawrence spoke about responsible ownership, and about knowing when a horse has had enough. Her position was that you cannot own a racehorse at a distance. You don't get to hand the animal off to the vet, the trainer, the jockey and the rest of your team and check the results later. You have to be involved to be a good owner. Gaines spoke about training, and said that some horses have that race mentality, which I found funny and which I have since concluded was not a joke.

Then Lovitt described a shift that may be the single most underreported feature of this sport. There has been an enormous change in the industry over the last two decades, she said, and the general public has not caught up to it. People hear that a racehorse retired at two years old and they feel sad, and then they stop wondering about the horse because nobody has ever told them what happens next.

The California Retirement Management Account (CARMA), is a nonprofit founded in 2007 that funds the retirement, rehabilitation and retraining of horses who raced in California. What happens next, in a growing number of cases, is that organizations like Lovitt's place those animals into second careers, as pets, as therapy horses, or on ranches. This past December alone, CARMA distributed $515,000 across twenty-two aftercare partners. There is an entire apparatus for supporting retired race horses, funded and staffed and operating, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it exists.

I had never heard the phrase "horse aftercare" before that afternoon. I had absorbed the vague public sadness about racehorses without once wondering whether anybody was doing anything about it. That gap between what the industry has actually built and what the rest of us assume, came up again and again over the next four hours, and I would argue it was the real story of the day.

Lawrence came at it from another angle later on. The conversation around racing needs to change, she said; the industry needs to be more supportive to all the people that work in it, and to be more positive about what it does. She also made a practical observation that stuck with me: the bettor doesn't need to come to the track anymore. Online wagering handles that. So if a track wants human beings in the building, the race day experience itself has to be worth the drive. Broge talked about how genuinely difficult it is for a new fan to follow individual horses and jockeys over time, and encouraged people to try anyway. That difficulty is downstream of something structural the panel kept circling: horse racing has no national league or governing organization, no commissioner's office, no unified season, no single standings page, no central marketing arm. It is a sport that never built the scaffolding the rest of American athletics takes for granted, and the panelists agreed it holds the whole thing back. Lovitt's advice, when it came, was the simplest thing anyone said all day. If you have any interest at all, get involved and meet people.

After the panel came the handicapping contest, which first required somebody to tell me what handicapping is. It is the systematic study of past performances, form and race conditions in order to predict the likeliest winner and identify a bet worth making. It is the analytical core of the sport, it has a national championship, and HRWA had brought in Judy Wagner to walk us through it. Wagner is the only woman ever to win that championship, which she did in 2001, and who has since served on the Louisiana State Racing Commission and chaired the Association of Racing Commissioners International.

We were each given a sheet with slots for the middle races on the card and told to use the information in our programs to pick winners. This is where I learned that a race card is not eight versions of the same race.

Every race carries a set of conditions printed at the top, and once you read them the day comes into focus as a kind of ladder. A maiden race is for horses that have never won. Race 2 was a maiden special weight for three-year-olds and up, five furlongs on the turf, with an $80,000 purse. A claiming race puts every horse in the field up for purchase at a set price, and any licensed owner can file a claim beforehand; if they do, the horse is theirs the moment the gate opens, win or lose. The day opened with one of those, a $16,000 claimer at five and a half furlongs on the dirt. Allowance races sit a rung higher, written around what a horse has not yet accomplished. Stakes races sit at the top, graded I through III, and those are the ones with names people recognize. Between them all sit hybrids such as maiden claiming, starter optional claiming, and allowance optional claiming that let a racing secretary fill a card with horses of genuinely comparable ability.

The conditions themselves read like tax code and are worth learning anyway. Non-winners of two races since April 23 allowed 2 lbs. Rail at 30 feet. For California bred or California sired maidens, fillies two years old. Each clause is doing work. “Allowed 2 lbs” essentially means weights get adjusted for age and recent form so that the field arrives at the gate roughly the same weight. Distances are measured in furlongs, an eighth of a mile each. Races run on dirt or turf, and on turf the rail gets moved in or out between race days to spare the grass. So if a rail is at 30 feet, there’s an additional 30 feet of track before the starting line. California-bred races carry extra money from a state owner incentive fund given by the California Thoroughbred Breeders Association, which is why Race 2's $80,000 purse was actually worth $105,000.

The claiming feature is not a technicality. Six horses changed hands that way on July 23 while I sat upstairs with a margarita, including the winner of the very first race and the winner of the very last one. Both were claimed by new owners who had made the decision to purchase before either horse ran a step.

And the wagering is pari-mutuel, which means you are not playing against the house. You are playing against everyone else who bet that race. All the money goes into one pool, the track takes its cut, and the remainder is divided among the winning tickets, which is why the odds keep sliding right up until the gates open. You can bet a horse to win, place (finish in first or second) or show (finish in first, second or third), or you can stack the bets. You can also bet an exacta for the first two in “exact” order, trifecta for three, superfecta for four, or you can bet a quinella for the first two in any order. You can also string races together with a daily double or a Pick 3, 4, 5 or 6. The pools on a Thursday afternoon in July ran to six figures apiece.

I absorbed maybe sixty percent of this and made my picks anyway. We ordered lunch off a menu the venue provided and ate while working the program.

What I mostly did with that hour was fall in love with the names. Sendit Mo. Joker Went Wild. Shemakesmemad. Zayda At the Spa. Dont Short Ur Self. Imnosurething. Chachacha Ching. Pokerknightatvees. If you want a free, low-stakes entry point into this sport, I promise the naming conventions alone will hold you for an afternoon.

The card refused to cooperate with anybody. At the end of the day, stats don’t tell the whole story and that’s the risk you take. Within our group, prizes went to the top three finishers and, mercifully, to the biggest loser. I was neither. The only man in the group, who had come with his girlfriend and had never handicapped anything in his life, finished second.

Race 4 was the day's HRWA-named race, a five-furlong turf sprint for fillies and mares, and afterward anyone who wanted to could go down to the winner's circle for a photograph with the horse that won it. That was Unbinding, a four-year-old bay filly bred in Great Britain, ridden by Antonio Fresu and trained by Mark Glatt. She went off the favorite, took the lead under pressure, moved clear at the quarter pole and drew away by four lengths.

The winner's circle sits right on the edge of the track, and I stood there while the horse came by a few feet from me. This is the point at which the small televisions at the ends of the tables started to seem like a design problem rather than a convenience. On a nine-inch screen, a horse race is information. At the rail it is twelve hundred pounds of animal moving past your body at forty miles an hour, and the sound reaches you before the horse does. It is not the same event. Lawrence had said an hour earlier that the race day experience has to be worth coming out for, and I don't think she was talking about the appetizers.

Women in the Sport of Horse Racing

Initially, when I was considering writing about the races, I was looking into female jockeys. Eight races, roughly seventy mounts, not one of them a woman. That is not a fluke of a single Thursday, either. There are no female jockeys riding at Del Mar this summer at all. Last year there was exactly one, Sofia Barandela, who came up out of Mexico City, spent five summers here as an exercise rider, and eventually left for Wyoming, Minnesota, Chicago and North Dakota because those were the places willing to put her on a horse.

The history that produced this fact is not gentle, and it is worth walking through, because the women who broke into this sport did it against organized opposition. Kathy Kusner became the first licensed female jockey in the United States in 1968, and only after suing the Maryland Racing Commission for rejecting her application on the basis of her sex; she went on to become the first licensed woman to ride in Mexico, Germany, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Panama and South Africa, and took a silver medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the first woman to medal in an equestrian event. Penny Ann Early was licensed the same year Kusner was and never got to use it, because male jockeys boycotted three separate times to keep her out of the race. Diane Crump became the first woman to ride in a pari-mutuel race in February of 1969, aboard a horse named Bridle 'n Bit at Hialeah Park, and the following year became the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby, finishing fifteenth. Two weeks after Crump's first ride, a nineteen-year-old named Barbara Jo Rubin won on a horse called Cohesion at Charles Town by half a length, the first woman to win a pari-mutuel race at a nationally recognized American track.

Cheryl White became the first licensed African American woman jockey in the country in 1971 and won her first race that September. She rode thoroughbreds, quarter horses, Arabians, Paints and Appaloosas, and when her riding career ended she passed the California Horse Racing Board's steward examination in 1991 and spent the rest of her working life as a racing official. P.J. Cooksey rode for twenty-six years and won 2,137 races, becoming the second woman to ride in the Derby and the first to ride in the Preakness. Rosemary Homeister Jr. became the first woman to win an Eclipse Award in 1992 and finished her career with 2,784 wins. Julie Krone won the Belmont Stakes aboard Colonial Affair in 1993, the first woman to win a Triple Crown race; ten years later she became the first woman to win a Breeders' Cup race, at Santa Anita; and in 2000 she became the first woman inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame. She remains the all-time leader among women riders with 3,704 wins and $90.1 million in purses. Rosie Napravnik won the Kentucky Oaks in 2012, rode all three Triple Crown races in a single season in 2013, and is the highest-placing woman ever in the Kentucky Derby.

Away from the saddle the record runs even deeper, and much further back. Laska Durnell became the first woman to own a Kentucky Derby winner in 1904 with Elwood, a horse that was also the first Derby runner bred by a woman. Penny Chenery took a business degree from Columbia and used it to rescue her father's failing Meadow Stable, which produced Riva Ridge and then Secretariat. Marje Everett ran both Arlington and Washington Park in Illinois, moved west, served as chief executive of Hollywood Park from 1985 to 1991, brought the Breeders' Cup to Inglewood twice and invented the wager that became the Pick 6. Stella Thayer bought Tampa Bay Downs in 1986 for $16.5 million, outbidding George Steinbrenner, and made it the first thoroughbred racetrack with separate female ownership and management. Jessica Paquette, who has moderated for HRWA, is currently the only woman working as a full-time thoroughbred race caller in North America.

Del Mar has its own entries in this ledger, some of them stranger than others. In 1980 a trainer named Mary Lou Tuck won both the Eddie Read and the Del Mar Handicap with the same grey horse, the biggest wins by a woman conditioner in track history to that point. Krone rode her first Del Mar season in 2003, at forty, and put on a match race against Pat Valenzuela that people still talk about. And in the early 2000s, when Del Mar's marketing department decided it needed a younger and more female audience, it built the "Cool as Ever" campaign and hired the jockey Chantal Sutherland as the public face of the track, a strategy successful enough to become a business school case study. In 2011 the track staged a match race between Sutherland and Mike Smith and, because the two had once been engaged, promoted it as the Battle of the Exes. Smith won.

So Del Mar has spent a quarter century marketing itself to women, with a woman jockey at the center of the pitch, and has arrived at a summer with no women riding.

What makes that absence strange rather than simply disappointing is that the women are all over the rest of the program. Gaines, who I had just watched speak, saddled a starter in the last race of the day. Paula Capestro sent out a filly in the third. Run a finger down the ownership lines of any race on the card and you will find women listed again and again, alone, in partnerships, behind stable names. HRWA's own leadership is a directory of the industry's working infrastructure: the vice president of industry relations at 1/ST Racing, the executive director of the California Thoroughbred Horsemen's Foundation, a senior vice president who has been on staff at Santa Anita since 1986. Women own the horses, train the horses, coordinate the winner's circle, fund the retirements and run the organizations. The saddle is the one place they have gone missing, and it happens to be the only job in racing a casual fan can name.

At The End of The Day

Prizes were handed out late in the afternoon, and then we went back upstairs to keep talking. I am a shy person and I did not have to work for a single conversation. People came to me. Several got visibly excited when I mentioned I was writing about the day, and wanted to make sure I understood what they did and why. It was a warm and inviting environment in a way I had not expected from a sport I associated mostly with expensive hats.

One word kept surfacing, from women who had been around horses their entire lives and from women who had never set foot on a track before that afternoon: mystical. Horse racing reads as mystical to anyone standing outside of it. There is a vocabulary, an information architecture and a set of conventions that nobody bothers to explain, with no obvious front door.

There is also the money. Racing has a reputation as a rich person's sport, and I am not going to pretend it is undeserved. I had never previously attended an event where the gift bag contained a handbag cleaning kit. I don't even think I have a bag I could use it for. But over the same afternoon I was also learning what the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club does to lower that wall. You can come out on weekend mornings, watch the horses work and eat breakfast for free. Every Thursday of the meet is Free & Easy Thursday, which gets Diamond Club members free admission, a free program and a free seat, and the Diamond Club membership itself costs nothing. July 23 happened to be the first Free & Easy Thursday of the season. General admission on any other day starts at ten dollars.

Eight races spread across roughly three and a half hours leaves a great deal of downtime, and the room used all of it. But when the gates opened, conversations stopped mid-sentence and every head turned to the nearest screen, and then came cheering or groaning depending. Nothing else in that room produced that effect. It is clear that bets make people emotionally invested in a way that food and networking do not. By the end of the day the track had drawn 8,839 people and handled just under $9.9 million in wagers.

I was encouraged, more than once, to place a bet. Even a small one. I didn't. But I understand now why people do, and more to the point, I understand what I would have been looking at.

That, in the end, is the argument for caring about any of this, and it is the argument HRWA is quietly making with an afternoon, a panel and a handicapping sheet. A ninety-year-old institution sits thirty minutes up the coast from most of us. It employs thousands of people, moves ten million dollars on an ordinary Thursday, and carries real ethical weight that a great many of us have already settled in our heads without ever checking. Some of what we assume is wrong: the aftercare work is real, it is well funded, and it is nearly invisible. Some of what we assume is right, and the empty women’s jockey colony is the clearest evidence. But neither the correction nor the criticism reaches anyone who never comes, and racing has spent two decades making it easier to bet from a phone than to stand at a rail.

I stood at the rail. It's better.

The Del Mar Thoroughbred Club will continue its season until September 7. The Horse Racing Women's Association's annual conference is October 12 through 14 in Lexington, Kentucky.