Pleasanton horse trainer reflects on the end of an era
PLEASANTON — Timothy Bellasis wears a black and blue bruise on his left hip after recently being kicked by a horse. It’s the latest injury for the horse trainer who has called the Alameda County Fairgrounds home for three decades.
While feeding, running and washing his stable of horses, he carries a slight hitch in his step, a painful reminder of the time six years ago when he fell off a horse and broke his hip.
The injury, he says, forced him to take two weeks off — the longest break he’s ever taken from thoroughbred horse training.
Until recently, next to nothing could keep the 66-year-old away from the Pleasanton’s Equestrian Center, a short drive from his single-wide mobile home at one of the ground’s RV parks. He’s the last in a long line of trainers living where there were once dozens of mobile homes. Bellasis could soon be gone, too.
“If I leave, they’ll rip this thing out of the ground and level it,” he said of his home. “If they want to kick everybody out, they can.”
He’s slowly watching the end of a storied yet controversial sport. Over the past few decades, racing has vanished from the Bay Area, first at the Bay Meadows track in San Mateo County and then, last year, at the East Bay’s Golden Gate Fields.
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The California Authority of Racing Fairs’ decision this year to cancel all races at county fairs – effectively shuttering racing in Northern California – sent shivers through a community already on edge, and now fearing this is the end. Meanwhile, the Alameda County Fair Association has announced that it will end stabling and training at the fairgrounds.
The hundreds of horses there will have to be relocated by the end of March, Bellasis said, and horse trainers, grooms, breeders and riders throughout the region will be pushed out of a job.
Races at the Pleasanton track – held during the summer fair – go back generations. First built in 1858, it is the oldest one-mile dirt track in the country, according to the county. It is also where the legendary Seabiscuit once trained.
A new organization, Golden State Racing, vowed at a meet last winter to revive Pleasanton racing, but Bellasis called the races a “disaster” with a lack of attendance, marketing and more.
Alameda County Supervisor Dave Haubert, who along with other county officials has held meetings on the matter, said “it’s certainly sad to see it come to this.” He hopes the county can find use for the land, and acknowledged that the fair would be losing out on racing revenue.
“I know that a lot of people will be disappointed,” Haubert said in an interview. “Every year I look forward to the racing season. I would say that this is a significant part of our cultural history, and it’s going away.”
Animal rights activists, however, are celebrating the news. Horse racing came under scrutiny in 2019, as a growing number of euthanizations at Golden Gate Fields and Santa Anita Park in Southern California left the industry reeling and prompted speculation that the controversy could end thoroughbred racing in California.
Kristina Verdile, a Pleasanton resident, has long been part of the local opposition to the races, claiming the conditions the horses are kept in are not healthy for the herd animals, which she said should be held in wide, grassy pastures with space to roam.
“That’s amazing. That’s a great step for animal rights and the rights for horses in Northern California,” Verdile said of the recent decision in an interview. “But I still have great concern about where these horses will end up, because many of them will be shipped to Southern California, where they can race there and where the rates of injury and death are high.”
These days, Bellasis uses the grounds to train his six horses. A naturally gifted storyteller, Bellasis can still be seen dressed in brown leather boots, jeans, a weathered winter coat and a black Ford cap embroidered with orange flames, while he makes his rounds feeding carrot pieces and sugar cubes to his horses.
He and his partner, Cassy Tschanz, an expert equestrian, bought the mobile home in the 1990s, cleaning up a place he said was tar-colored due to the previous owner chain smoking cigarettes inside. On a recent visit, the San Francisco-born man who grew up in Menlo Park and Pleasanton showed off his San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s memorabilia, before digging up a photo from 1986 of “Smart Gem,” his horse who placed first at the Sacramento State Fair that year.
He laughed and smiled wide, seeing Tschanz, who died last year, with a man’s arm around her in the winners circle.
“She had no idea who the hell she was standing next to,” Bellasis recalled. “I said, ‘That’s Willie Mays!’”
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When Tschanz’s health started to decline, he said, he started rehoming some of his horses, because he had a dozen at the time and needed to work less in order to spend more time with her. In their prime, the two would keep up to 25 horses at most, and normally kept between 15 to 20 throughout their 39 years together.
Now he has just six, some of which will never race again, and a couple which he’s planning to run in the coming months. His largest horse, 7-year-old “Gallant Warren,” has a career 63 races, with six first-place wins, 13 second-place honors and nine third-place finishes, bringing a total of $219,315 in earnings since 2020. Just a few years ago, Gallant Warren won Bellasis his biggest purse ever — about $42,000. The horse ran its final race last year.
Now, he’s planning to run his remaining horses, including “Old Triangle,” at the Santa Anita track in Southern California. He is not looking forward to the travel and different track conditions there.
He says he faces a difficult decision: pick up and move everything to Southern California, move out of state, or retire.
“Nobody wants to retire. I don’t want to retire. It’s being forced,” he said. “It’s the end of life in our circle. Racing for the Bay Area? Gone.”
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