JC / Railbird

Media/TV/Film Archive

ESPN Will Still Show CCAO

– When news broke Monday morning that Rags to Riches was out of Saturday’s Coaching Club American Oaks at Belmont, it seemed logical that ESPN would go back to their original plan to show the San Diego Handicap at Del Mar, which had been bumped for the Oaks and the anticipated appearance of the Belmont winner. Well, that’s not happening. “[ESPN] just couldn’t react fast enough,” said Craig Dado, Del Mar’s vice president for marketing. “I guess it serves them right. I think that’s what they call karma” (North Country Times).
– Breeders’ Cup officials unveiled a new Breeders’ Cup web site today and announced that the entire Breeders’ Cup day card would be streamed live online (ThoroTimes). Cool.
– Curlin worked five furlongs in 1:00.2 over the Oklahoma training track this morning (BRIS). The Preakness winner is scheduled to start next in the August 5 Haskell at Monmouth.

Posted in Media/TV/Film on July 17, 2007

No Box, No Coverage

Last November, when the Boston Globe made the disappointing announcement that racing entries and results would no longer be published in the paper’s sports section, sports editor Joe Sullivan tried to soothe readers who protested that “a Sunday box on feature races” would appear throughout the year. Two months later, there’s a small problem with that promise: There are no Sunday boxes on feature races. True, there wasn’t much to report through December. It was a quiet season. Yet, today’s Sunday paper has nothing on yesterday’s San Rafael, in which likely 2005 Juvenile champion and early Kentucky Derby favorite Stevie Wonderboy returned to the scene in what was basically a match race that just happened to be a graded stakes, finishing second. You would think that that race would warrant one of those little boxes Sullivan was talking about, or at least two inches pulled from a wire service story and tucked away in a side column sports news roundup. It didn’t even get that treatment, which begs the question: What races are big enough to earn Globe coverage? Let’s hope the answer proves to be more than the Kentucky Derby.
Related: MSNBC contributor Travis Stone urges fans to act to keep racing in the news: “The fall-out of our unwillingness to act could be devastating. Imagine the Kentucky Derby, going from front cover, to inside page, and then to a minor statistic before being taken off the press completely. The potential exists and it is time to step up. We may have broken slow, but it is too soon to ease ourselves out of this race.”

Posted in Media/TV/Film on January 15, 2006

Globe Cuts Entries & Results

As of today, the Boston Globe will no longer publish entries and results for area dog and harness tracks or entries and results for New York thoroughbred tracks. “The Globe sports section has to evolve along with the changes that have taken place in sports,” writes sports editor Joe Sullivan in explanation of the decision. The paper does intend to print entries and results for Suffolk Downs when it reopens in the spring, and apparently will run “a Sunday box on feature races” throughout the year. Well, I guess that’s better than nothing.
Elsewhere in the paper: The Globe reprints, in its entirety and unchanged, a downer of an article about slots and the future of Suffolk Downs that was originally published on November 10. You’d think an editor would have at least updated the text about the “upcoming” end of the legislative session, which closed on November 18 without passing the slots-simulcasting bill discussed in the piece.
Moving in the opposite direction: The Boston Herald, which announced that it’s expanding its racing entries and results to include Calder.

Posted in Media/TV/Film on November 27, 2005

“Who Do You Like Today?”

The NTRA is launching a new advertising campaign with the slogan, “Who do you like today?” replacing “Go, baby, go” (Blood-Horse). Patrick of Pulling Hair & Betting Horses thinks the new tagline puts too much emphasis on wagering, but I think it says more about the social aspect of the sport than the gambling. I’ve had a lot of racetrack conversations that start with some variation on the slogan — “Who do you like here?” or “Any tips today?” — followed by a couple of minutes talk about various horses or that day’s races. It’s companionable, and it’s one of the things that makes going to the track more fun than staying home and watching racing on TVG. I hope the ads convey that. Of course, whether or not tracks successfully capitalize on any response to the ads is another matter …

Posted in Media/TV/Film on October 13, 2005