Jockeys
ESPN Is to Sports …
College football fans tuned into ESPN this Saturday will get a chance to see Zenyatta. As part of a Breeders’ Cup Challenge telecast running from 6:30 to 8:00 PM ET on ESPN Classic and ESPN360, ESPN will break in between games at 7:15 PM to air the Lady’s Secret Stakes from Oak Tree at Hollywood Park.
I can’t knock exposure, especially for a champion with a story fit for Oprah and a game that has such loyal fans, but I keep thinking about a comment by Ed on the Plonk post of last week: “it’s hard to believe that it was just 12 years ago that ESPN was still televising the Little Brown Jug LIVE.”
Well into the 1990s, you could say ESPN was a true sports network, with an eclectic line-up that included football, baseball, soccer, golf, bass fishing, and the X Games. If people played it, ESPN aired it. Changes came with ABC/Disney ownership, competition from other networks, and an ambitious expansion plan that rode the rise of cable and the web, turning ESPN into the TV-radio-digital-print behemoth it is now. There’s a downside to this dominance, though, a homogenizing of sport, an emphasis on the popular and lucrative.
Think of it this way: ESPN is to sports as Playboy was to sex.
Like Hugh Hefner’s groundbreaking men’s magazine, ESPN transformed an industry, becoming hugely influential to a generation of young men and radically reshaping their perceived interests. Along the way, it became less a celebration of all that is athletic than a platform for aggregating massive advertiser-friendly audiences. That means fewer small-market sports, whether hockey or horseracing, and more major league sports and specious “news” coverage. When all of sports was a niche, more sporting niches thrived. Gone mainstream, broadly appealing sports “narratives” gain prominence.
What that means for racing is that events such as the Breeders’ Cup need ESPN to reach the largest possible audience of sports fans, but ESPN has no need for horseracing — which is why on Saturday, Zenyatta will be the entertainment between football games, not the main attraction.
It’s not a BC Challenge race, so it won’t be appearing on any ESPN channel, but Blind Luck versus Havre de Grace in the Cotillion Stakes at Philadelphia Park Parx on Saturday looks like a must-watch race. It’ll be the third meeting between the two 3-year-old fillies. Stakes winner Awesome Maria, making her second start of the year, is also entered. The Cotillion is part of the second annual Lady Riders Challenge, a very cool, under-reported event.
Watch this Kid
Rising rider William Buick made quite an impression over the weekend:
In the Foy it was the jockey who caught the eye as much as his mount. When a sportsman’s eye is in, it’s in, and young William Buick and his boss John Gosden, triumphant in the St Leger at Doncaster on Saturday with Arctic Cosmos, rounded off a dream weekend by taking the older horse prep with Duncan, the outsider in a field of six.
Buick, 22, is one of the weighing room’s outstanding emerging talents and for the second day in succession showed all the qualities that prompted Gosden to fast-track him to the big time. On Arctic Cosmos, he had ridden a finely-judged race from off a demanding pace to notch his first Classic; yesterday he controlled the game for most of the way.
Buick insists he’s not the new Frankie Dettori, but:
With good looks, youth and talent on his side, Buick’s rise has gathered momentum. Twelve months ago he landed a valuable but relatively insignificant sales race at Doncaster. Now he has five Group Ones and the prospect of two tasty mounts on the massive Breeders’ Cup stage in November with Arctic Cosmos (Turf) and Debussy (Classic).
He’s going to be a star at Churchill Downs during Breeders’ Cup week.
Every Winner’s Circle a Stage
Frankie Dettori, “the housewives’ favourite jockey,” on his most famous move:
“Everyone associates me with the dismount,” admits Dettori, who perfected it with seven winners in one famous Saturday at Ascot in 1993. “I’m the slave to my own act now. I do it because children on school holidays, perhaps having a day out at Lingfield, expect me to. It’s part of the thing I’ve created. I can’t get out of it.”
Flashback to 2008: About that award-winning Dettori dismount photo.
On the subject of ebullient jockeys: John Scheinman profiles Calvin Borel on BC360. “At Churchill, trainers stand in line like I’m selling ice cream,” says agent Jerry Hissam of his client. “At Saratoga …”
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Jessica Chapel is a writer, editor, and web producer living in Massachusetts. Railbird is a thoroughbred horse racing blog published since June 2004. More ›
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