Noted: November 9
– Eclipse voters, listen to trainer Richard Dutrow: Breeders’ Cup Sprint winner Silver Train is being sent to Palm Meadows and won’t start again until 2006. Asked if missing the Cigar Mile on November 26 might affect the colt’s chances of being named champion sprinter, Dutrow replied, “He don’t belong getting sprinter of the year.”
– It only took a congressional hearing: Jockeys’ Guild representative Darrell Haire has called for Guild president Wayne Gertmenian to resign. “Gertmenian’s management has been virtually nonexistent for months, and staff has been left hanging out there…. If Gertmenian really cared about the jockeys, he’d step down, but I doubt if he will leave until he’s forced out,” said Haire.
– An unlucky horse turns lucky: Take a Shot was one of the 160 horses caught up in a tornado at Ellis Park on Sunday. He emerged uninjured from the storm to win an allowance race at Churchill Downs Tuesday afternoon. “This horse has had a hard-luck way of going his whole life,” said trainer Shane Warpool. “He went through a fence as a baby in a bad storm. In his last race at Ellis (on Sept. 3) he almost lost his eye. He caught a stone or something on the turf course. So he’s been a bad-luck guy. But this one time the luck worked out for him.”
– Such a nice article, such an unfortunate headline: Shebiscuit.
– Sorceror’s Stone is scheduled for surgery: A bone chip will be removed from the two-year-old’s left ankle. “He came out of [the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile] with just a little change in his left ankle and we X-rayed him and have decided to stop on him and do a little ankle surgery on him,” trainer Patrick Byrne said. “It’s just a little tiny fragment.” After resting for 60 days, Sorceror’s Stone will return to training at Gulfstream Park.
– Beware racing newspapers: “A financial adviser who stole £10million to fund his love of racehorses was jailed for 12 years yesterday. Graham Price even left an IOU for £7million in his bank’s safe. The 58-year-old, known to his loyal customers as ‘Mr Halifax,’ turned from honest businessman to crook after subscribing to a racing newspaper.”
