Wildfires Play No Favorites With Racing Community

The Earth spins on its axis at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour. Sometimes, for us mere mortals, it seems even faster. On the afternoon of Jan. 5, the filly Look Forward stepped up to win the Santa Ynez Stakes and promptly put herself in the thick of the West Coast 3-year-old division. She was ridden by Mario Gutierrez, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Derby (G1) who had not won a graded race in more than a year. Then Jan. 7 his house burned down. There are 104 million acres of land in California, made up of seashore and desert, forest and farmland, with great swaths of urban density interrupting vast landscapes populated by ground squirrels, bobcats, and mule deer. Through Jan. 10, more than 14,000 of those acres had been burned in the Eaton Fire raging less than 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. Judge Benjamin S. Eaton was a 19th century Los Angeles politician and real estate developer. He brought the water from the creek in the canyon known as El Precipicio to the lowlands of Pasadena, Calif., where his Fair Oaks Ranch was located. Later, the canyon and the creek were named for the judge. Now, the name is synonymous with a deadly, destructive burst of nature at its most malevolent. The Gutierrez home, located in the town of Monrovia, Calif., was among the approximately 7,000 structures destroyed during the first four days of the fire in a row of cities—including Monrovia, Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Altadena, and Pasadena—stretching west to east beneath the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains. Gutierrez, his wife, Rebecca, and 8-year-old son, Sebastian, evacuated safely on the night of Jan. 7, not long after the first flames were being fanned by powerful desert winds. "Since I've lived here I've watched those mountains burn at least three times," said trainer Eoin Harty, nodding toward the charred hillsides in the distance, just above his home in Monrovia. "But when you can see flames from your house and are told to evacuate, there's no thinking about it. You'll never win that battle. You're taking your life in your hands if you stay." Five fatalities had been confirmed in the Eaton Fire, once of them a man who stayed at his home in Altadena to fight the blaze. His body was found holding a garden hose. "When I was young, we had a hay barn catch fire at our place in Ireland," Harty added. "There's no experience like it. All we could do was get the horses out and watch it burn." Once his neighborhood was out of immediate fire danger, Harty stood watch at home in the darkness three nights last week while area power was out, after which the National Guard took up positions protecting neighborhoods from looters. By the afternoon of Jan. 10, access still was heavily restricted in the most severely burned neighborhoods, with even desperate residents prevented from returning to their homes. Trainer Michael McCarthy also was waiting to get back into his house in the upper reaches of Altadena, where he battled nearby flames during the first hours of the fire. He was joined by fellow trainer Jonathan Thomas, an Easterner who was getting a full initiation into the terror of California wildfires. "That night, the scene from Santa Anita was apocalyptic," Thomas said. "It looked like the fire was coming all the way down the mountain to Arcadia. We were ready for the high winds and had tied everything down at the barn. But the fires were something else. "About three doors up from Mike all the brush had caught fire across the street," Thomas said. "It absolutely had the potential of burning down to his house. We ran up there and had a bucket brigade going. Driving around that area, there were embers floating everywhere and flaming palm fronds falling to the road." Even by the afternoon of Jan. 11, the Eaton Fire was only 15% contained. On the other side of L.A. County, the 22,000-acre Palisades Fire was just 11% contained as Saturday evening approached. "We had the roof of our house ripped off by a tornado when I was a kid in Virginia," Thomas recalled. "And I was working for Todd Pletcher in New York during Hurricane Sandy. That was a pretty brutal couple days. But this was beyond anything I've ever witnessed." With the region still in emergency mode, Santa Anita's Saturday and Sunday racing programs were called off. "It was a good idea, for the horses, of course," Thomas said. "But when a community has been so devastated, as much as I love horse racing it's one of the least important things happening right now." Dr. Jeff Blea, equine medical director of the California Horse Racing Board, was amazed that his community of Sierra Madre, just north of Santa Anita, was not as heavily impacted as the surrounding towns. "We evacuated that first night," he said. "I didn't like the direction the wind was blowing. And the way the fire was moving, we never expected our town to be so unbelievably lucky." Blea has been consulting daily with track management on air quality issues pertaining to training and racing. "Any living being with a set of lungs is susceptible because of the air particles," Blea said. "Thoroughbred racehorses do have somewhat of a unique advantage by the fact they are fit athletes, although it's hard to delineate which individuals might be more or less susceptible." Horses were limited to jogging and galloping during the week until Saturday when timed workouts were allowed to resume. "As for racing, if the air quality was the only issue right now, I don't think you'd have justification to be opposed," Blea added. "But as we know that's not the only factor. As an industry, we need to demonstrate our social license to operate." In response to the crisis, track management made one of its large parking lots available to an unofficial "pop-up" effort to accept donations of living necessities and distribute them to people who have either lost their homes or were evacuated at a moment's notice from impacted areas with barely the clothes on their backs. By Saturday afternoon, thousands had taken advantage of the initiative. The question of what to take when fleeing a fire is one of those psychological parlor games that has no answer until the time comes. These days, all but the oldest photos are on phones, and vital records can be tucked into a laptop or the Cloud. While evacuating with his family to a Pasadena hotel from their home in Altadena, McCarthy made a point of grabbing the trainer's trophy won courtesy of Rombauer in the 2021 Preakness Stakes (G1), along with a couple of Breeders' Cup statuettes won by City of Light and Ce Ce. Asked if there were other mementos he considered, McCarthy was quick to reply. "There's nothing that can't be replaced," he said. "I'll be fine as long as I have my two most important trophies—my wife and my daughter." As for Mario Gutierrez and his family, the jockey confirmed by text that they have temporarily relocated to Del Mar and are doing as well as can be expected. At 38, the native of El Higo, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, has earned his share of the $66.5 million banked by his mounts, while Look Forward represented win number 1,390 in a career that began in Mexico City. North American success followed, and after winning back-to-back riding titles at Hastings Racecourse in British Columbia, back in 2007 and 2008, Gutierrez did what any grateful young athlete would do with his newfound riches. He built his mother a house.