Pete Aiello to call races at Santa Anita this weekend

Pete Aiello stepped into Santa Anita Park’s announcer’s booth and changed the sound of the weekend card, while Frank Mirahmadi headed east to Saratoga Race Course for the five-day Belmont Stakes Racing Festival. It was a small staffing swap on paper, but at a track with Santa Anita’s reach, the voice on the mic shapes how bettors hear a race, how fans feel the stretch run and how a close finish lives in memory.

Aiello was set to call Santa Anita races June 6-8, taking over for Mirahmadi, who has been Santa Anita’s track announcer since December 2018. The move also sent Jason Beem, the regular announcer at Tampa Bay Downs, to Gulfstream Park for the same weekend so Aiello could make the trip west. That kind of cross-country rotation is part of racing’s national calendar, and this one was tied to one of the sport’s biggest weekends in New York, the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival and the 157th running of the Belmont Stakes.

For Santa Anita, the change mattered because the announcer is part of the product. The caller sets the rhythm of the race, the timing of the call, and the emotional register of the finish. Aiello’s style has long fit that role at Gulfstream Park, where he has been the year-round announcer since 2016, but this was different. BloodHorse noted it was his first full weekend foray at Santa Anita, even though he had already handled guest calls there during the 2023 Breeders’ Cup, including the Juvenile Turf, Juvenile Fillies Turf and the Sen. Ken Maddy Stakes. A booth voice with that kind of familiarity can make a weekend card feel tighter, faster and more immediate for the live audience.

Aiello said the work comes down to rhythm, and he treated the assignment as both familiar and fresh. He said he felt honored that Frank and the Santa Anita team invited him back out this weekend, and he described Santa Anita as “The Great Race Place.” Mirahmadi, meanwhile, was pulled into another high-profile seat at Saratoga, where he has also been part of the New York Racing Association’s announcer rotation since 2023. Belmont Park’s multiyear renovation shifted the festival north, and that ripple reached all the way to Southern California.

So the booth swap was more than a temporary fill-in. It was another reminder that racing’s biggest weekends are built not just by horses and riders, but by the voices that carry every move from the break to the wire.