Zenyatta
Saturday Notes
NYRA keeps up its efforts to capture displaced OTB bettors, adding dark day simulcasting at Aqueduct and more bus routes from the city to the track. According to DRF, another 74 NYRA Rewards accounts were opened on Thursday, bringing the number of new accounts opened over the past couple weeks to 300. Friday’s on-track handle (which includes money bet through NYRA’s ADW) was $572,687, or $36,327 more than Thursday’s on-track handle; $22,125 more than the previous Friday. Slow, but steady gains? They must be hoping the pace picks up a little. Adding streaming video to the service would be a boon, but making that little change is tied up in the NYSRWB and, quite possibly, the legislature. Brooklyn Backstretch has been keenly following that part of the story.
Meanwhile, on Friday, the state senate Republicans announced the newly formed Task Force on the Revitalization of the Racing Industry in New York. Said task force member senator John Bonacic: “Racing is more than about people sitting in betting parlors. It is about the sport — making the tracks viable as racing entities — not just places where VLTs are played. We need to focus on helping the breeders and horsemen since they are the infrastructure that develops a successful racing product. We then need to market racing in a manner which brings fans to the track and generates interest in the sport overall.” Good luck, New Yorkers. [12/13/10 Addition: Over on ESPN, Paul Moran comments: “But wherever there is a New York politician, there is never the lack of calamity.”]
Juvenile graded stakes racing winds down for the year with the Hollywood Starlet, which drew eight fillies, today and the Hollywood Futurity next Saturday. “A field of 13 or 14 is shaping up for the 30th running of the race,” including JP’s Gusto and Delta Jackpot winner Gourmet Dinner. Joe Talamo, back from injury, will be on JP’s Gusto once again. The jockey rode the horse through his first three starts. Pat Valezuala then had the mount through the Breeders’ Cup, winning the Del Mar Futurity and Best Pal with JP’s Gusto.
What a process, getting Zenyatta settled into farm life.
Final Appearances
Zenyatta paraded for fans in sunny California on Sunday, in snowy Kentucky on Monday. Despite the cold, a good-sized crowd turned out at Keeneland to see the champion one last time before she retreats to stud. I wish the same could have been done for Rachel Alexandra, unceremoniously retired at the end of September. But even though honoring the filly was something Churchill Downs was interested in doing, her connections were not, explains Jennie Rees: “However, six days before the fall meet began, Stonestreet Stable quietly sent a van to pick up Rachel at Churchill to take her to the farm …”
10:50 AM Update: Many thanks to Susan for pointing out a recent post (with photo!) on the Stonestreet Farms Facebook page: “For those of you who are interested in seeing [Rachel Alexandra], we wanted you to know that after the first of the year, we will be announcing … occasional visitation days …”
The Numbers
The Racing Post’s Rating of the Breeders’ Cup Classic:
All the best dirt horses in America featured and it produced an above average winner, and, for that matter, an above average runner-up. Blame had proved himself a progressive horse in the top division this season and on Saturday he climbed the final pass to the top of the handicapping ranks with an RPR of 131. Zenyatta, in receipt of a 3lb mares’ allowance, matched her previous best ease-adjusted RPR of 128+ from last year’s Classic. On the raw figures, this was the best performance of her life.
Both Blame and Zenyatta received a Beyer Speed Figure of 111 for the Classic. That matches Blame’s previous top in the Whitney, in which he defeated Quality Road, and is one less than the career-high 112 that Zenyatta was given for the 2009 Classic. The consistency suggests we saw the best of both.
How about Uncle Mo? Mike Watchmaker on the Juvenile winner’s BSF:
The 108 Beyer he earned in the Juvenile was the second highest since Beyers were first published for this race in 1991. The highest Beyer ever in the Juvenile was War Pass’s 113 in 2007. But that Juvenile was run over a sloppy, sealed track, and we all know that conditions like that can often produce aberant [sic], untrustworthy figures.
Mo’s figure ties that of Street Sense in the 2006 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, also at Churchill Downs. Street Sense went on to win the 2007 Kentucky Derby off two preps, which is what trainer Todd Pletcher plans for his young star.
Breeders’ Cup handle, attendance, ratings, and website traffic were all up this year. From Tuesday’s press release announcing the gains:
Traffic to the Breeders’ Cup web site and micro sites, also experienced strong growth. Traffic to the Breeders’ Cup main web site, www.breederscup.com, was up 25% over 2009 and traffic to its specialty handicapping site, www.breederscup360.com, was up 600%.
I’m so pleased. And now that we’re a couple days away from the stress of keeping the BC360 site up, I can delight in the fact that we broke the server on Saturday afternoon — that’s how good traffic was across the BC network. On BC360, every significant metric — pageviews, unique visitors, time on site — showed tremendous growth. We had visitors from 127 countries, up from 90 in 2009, with increased numbers from the UK, Canada, and Australia. All credit to the editors and contributors, and thanks to everyone who visited!
While compiling the final BC360 stats report on Monday, I noticed that the iPad, introduced in January, came in #6 among visitors’ browser/OS combinations, and that not only did it register so high for a new device, but that it seemed to supplant smartphone usage, which was down across devices. Part of that may be due — at least for iPhone users — to the successful introduction of the Breeders’ Cup iPhone app this year, but it also occurred to me that people may prefer the tablet for mobile web browsing over the smartphone experience. Turns out, I may have stumbled onto a trend: “Are tablets the smartphone killer?,” asks Wired. It’s certainly plausible.
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Jessica Chapel writes and edits in Massachusetts. Railbird is a Thoroughbred horse racing blog published from June 2004 to July 2019. More / Contact
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