Wacky Wednesday at Suffolk
“It wasn’t a full moon, but something celestial seemingly made it a wacky Wednesday at Suffolk. The battery for one of the starting gates died just before the first race. In the third race, a horse flipped in the starting gate, causing a five-minute delay. The stewards disqualified the winner of the fourth race for what they saw as two distinct fouls in the same race. They then declared Nieges Que Te Amo a non-starter in the fifth race, after he reared up in the gate and unseated jockey Edwin Molinari seconds before the starter opened the gates. The horse ran loose during the race and bothered some of the other horses, but was covered up so well in the pack, the track announcer and fans couldn’t tell what had happened until the far turn.” (Daily Racing Form)
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The November issue of Boston Magazine has an article on Suffolk Downs’ backstretch workers. The photos by Joshua Dalsimer are striking; the text by John Wolfson is offensive. “Most of the hundreds of men and women here never had a single glory day. They probably never will,” he writes of those that work on the backstretch, focusing his story on a couple of broken-down, hard-luck souls and one scrappy immigrant. So bleak. So colorful! What a nice little trip for Mr. Wolfson into a world of hard knocks and hard work. Too bad that the story he writes isn’t the story of most of those who make their living with the horses.
