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Is it gonna be like Los Al, where you have two distinct horse populations sharing the track, 'cause there sure is heck is not much overlap between the NoCal and SoCal horse populations. NoCal is where the slow horses go, simply shipping them back to SoCal isn't going to help unless you are going to run 14 race cards including a slew of beaten 4k claimers lol.
It would be like consolidating FL with NYRA. What percentage of FL runners could even compete? 5%? Not for nothing, but only a handful of the displaced jockeys and horsemen would be able to potentially make a living, the rest will have to relocate to a circuit where their horses and talent fit. Perhaps Stornach is just proposing to buy a million dollars worth of bus tickets lol?
They can certainly close GG, but unless they are planning on severely degrading SoCal racing their is no way to incorporate the displaced horses and folks into Socal. The best Stronach could do was providing funding to establish a new NoCal base such as at Cal Expo, otherwise, it is very likely that the entire fair circuit will also fall by the wayside.
One of the problems with running a high quality meet in SoCal is the lack of mid-range feeder tracks to help maintain a high quality horse population while providing the lesser lights a chance to earn their way. Outside of California, the best racing to be found is at TuP, Arapahoe and Emerald, and all are very far away and the racing is pretty low level. So unless Stronach is hoping to enhance SoCal by rehoming cheap claimers from upstate and being the sole place to race every Cal-bred ever born, I think this proposal will just result in degraded SoCal racing and nothing more.
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