– “Trainer Juan Serey, once the terror of the claiming game in New York and New Jersey racing, roared back to action yesterday when he saddled three horses at Monmouth Park after more than three years in the wilderness” (New York Post).
– A solid group of 93 has been nominated to the Claiming Crown. The event will take place at Canterbury Park on July 16. Runaway Russy, last seen barely keeping up with Funny Cide in the Suburban, and Lord of the Game, recent winner of the Cornhusker, are among the 11 named to the day’s big race, the $150,000 Jewel (Blood-Horse).
– Prairie Meadows has fined Corey Nakatani $300 for not riding Cee’s Irish to the wire in the Iowa Oaks last week. “It didn’t affect the outcome of the race, but the stewards said that it presented a poor image” (Des Moines Register).
– Ryan Fogelsonger makes his MTV debut tonight in “True Life: I Want a Perfect Body II.” A camera crew from the show followed the jockey for six months as he worked to add eight pounds of muscle to his 104-pound frame (Laurel).
Posted by JC in Miscellany on 07/07/2005 @ 1:20 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
Horrific news out of London this morning … more than 30 dead and hundreds injured in three explosions on the Underground and another on a double decker bus. A group calling itself the “Secret Organisation Group of al-Qaeda” has claimed responsibility. The full text of the statement can be found here on the BBC site, which also has a thorough compilation of breaking news, reporters’ notes, photographs, and a map with chronology of today’s attacks. American writer David Plotz is in London to promote his new book, “The Genius Factory,” and Slate has posted his account of walking around the city post-attacks. Plotz finds the English being, well, English:
When I left the quiet area right around the bus bombing and returned to the busy streets of Holborn and Soho, London appeared just as it always is.
The natural state of the English is a kind of gloomy diligence, which is why they do so well in hard times. In 1940, Londoners went dutifully on with their business while the Luftwaffe bombed the hell out of them. Today, most of them are doing the same. I was in Washington for 9/11, and the whole city went into a panic. Offices emptied, stores shut, downtown D.C. became a ghost town. But in London today, everyone still has a cell phone clutched to their ear. The delivery vans are still racing about, seeking shortcuts around all the street closures. The Starbucks is packed.
And when I walked by the Queen’s Larder Pub, not half a mile from the Tavistock Square wreckage, at 11 a.m., a half-dozen men were sitting together at a sidewalk table, hoisting their morning pints of ale. Civilization must go on, after all.
Eyewitness accounts give a less reassuring sense of the aftermath.
The Thoroughbred Times reports that racing at Newmarket continued as scheduled, but that Epsom has cancelled its evening card.
Posted by JC in International on 07/07/2005 @ 1:15 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
It was 30 years ago today that the undefeated Ruffian met the 1975 Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure in a match race billed as a “battle of the sexes.” Ruffian was the perfect filly: “Raced 10 times. Won 10 times. Led at every call of every race. All those 1’s made her past performance chart look like a picket fence” (Philadelphia Inquirer). Foolish Pleasure was a pretty good colt. Like much from the 1970s, all I know of Ruffian comes from photographs, fuzzy television footage, and other people’s stories. ESPN Classic aired a “SportsCenter Flashback” episode on Ruffian this afternoon that filled in the gaps (ESPN), with interviews from her connections and film from the match race, including the scenes where Ruffian breaks down (previous documentaries about the race have blurred the images). The moment that really got me was when announcer Dave Johnson calls Foolish Pleasure taking the lead and then cries, “Ruffian has broken down.” His voice glides from astonishment to grief in a second. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.
Related: For Christy Cassady, a horse-crazy 16-year-old in 1975, “Ruffian symbolized something significant for a teenage girl trying to find her way in the male-dominated world of athletics. Ruffian didn’t just win, she won big, taking the lead from the start and never looking back against the best fillies in the country” (Lexington Herald-Leader).
Posted by JC in Horses on 07/06/2005 @ 6:00 pm / Follow @railbird on Twitter
