JC / Railbird

Miscellany Archive

A Year to Forget

Barely a week into the new year and already 2005 seems so long ago. I guess that speaks to what an abysmal year in racing it was: 2005 opened with indictments against 17 people for race fixing, fraud, and conspiracy; it closed with the retirement of Afleet Alex. In the months between, the Jockeys’ Guild collapsed into scandal and insolvency, three jockeys died, and NYRA barely escaped bankruptcy. In Massachusetts, Suffolk Downs cancelled the Massachusetts Handicap and Northampton Fair cancelled thoroughbred racing permanently. No, it wasn’t a very good year. Bill Finley, Jay Privman, and Jennie Rees catalog the woes and say goodbye to 12 months they’d all rather forget.
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Of course, it wasn’t all bad …
On the track: Afleet Alex amazed in the Preakness and then triumphed in the Belmont, Rock Hard Ten showed his true talent in the Strub and Goodwood, Ghostzapper dazzled in the Met Mile, Lost in the Fog wowed crowds in every race he ran before the Breeders’ Cup Sprint, and Megahertz proved again and again what a dynamo she was on the turf, winning four out of six starts with her patented late kick.
In the press: This was John Scheinman’s year. Whether writing about a stakes race or the last start of a local favorite, the Washington Post racing correspondent delivered consistently fantastic coverage of the Maryland-Virginia circuit.

Posted in Miscellany on January 7, 2006

Odds & Ends

In his Lowell Sun column this week, Paul Daley interviews Gary Donahue, a jockey paralyzed in 1986. Until dismissed from the position in 2003, Donahue was co-chairperson of the Jockeys’ Guild Disabled Jockeys Fund. His questions about the fund’s depletion helped set in motion the changes in Jockeys’ Guild management made last Tuesday.
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There’s an interesting Letter to the Editor in last Friday’s Daily Racing Form from one Lenny Moon of Maryland, who writes to suggest that the public be given information about how horses behave in NYRA’s detention barn. “It is unfair to everyone who wagers to have such critical information withheld,” he says, referring specifically to the poor performances of Lost in the Fog and Joey P. on Breeders’ Cup Day after both were supposedly rattled in the detention barn. This isn’t a bad idea: Most horses that I saw in the Saratoga detention barn last summer took to the quarantine without problem, but a few freaked out (sometimes violently) at the change in routine or at the barn area itself and only a small number of those were scratched before a race because of their distress. The rest were sent to the track nervous or already spent. There must be a way this information could be codified and disseminated, much like shoe changes and overweights are, before races.
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The December issue of the Atlantic Monthly has a great short article about the business of slot machines (no link because the article is available online only to subscribers). I never play the things — I find chasing after dumb luck dull and most casino/racino environments depressing — but I’m obviously in the minority. Among the surprising statistics cited in the article: “America now has twice as many publicly available gambling devices that take money — slot and video poker machines and electronic lottery outlets — as it does ATMs that dispense it … This year a record 73 million Americans will visit one of 1,200 gambling joints now stretching from coast to coast … More than a quarter of American adults now list gambling as their No. 1 entertainment choice.” More than a quarter of adults? Who are these people? More importantly, how can racing find them?

Posted in Miscellany on November 21, 2005

Et Tu, DRF?

The Daily Racing Form starts a poker column.

Posted in Miscellany on November 17, 2005