A Horseplayer’s (Culture) Diary
A rumored riff on a legendary handicapper and Stendhal doesn’t appear, but Moshe Diane* at Saratoga does, between Yves Klein and silent films.
Speaking of well-named horses, Crown of Thorns returns in the Pat O’Brien at Del Mar on Saturday. I remember thinking the now 5-year-old would be a factor in the 2008 classic races. Instead, he was away 19 months due to injury. This time, he’s coming off a layoff of nearly 10 months. His last race was the 2009 Breeders’ Cup Sprint, in which he finished second by a nose.
There are so many reasons this won’t happen any time soon, but give Alan Shuback credit for tossing the idea out there: To save America’s graded stakes, eliminate pari-mutuel clerks and outriders.
Ghostly Memories
1. How is it that I hadn’t heard of the Holy Ghost or Ecuador betting systems before? After Bill Christine’s latest, I’ll be watching for the double-double:
Pack gave pre-race handicapping seminars called the Paddock Club at the New York tracks. One day at Saratoga he told his audience: “If by some miracle today, in a later race, the same horse qualifies as both the Ghost and the Ecuador, you are permitted to leave the track, go to the Adirondack Trust on Broadway, rob it, and get back in time for this big score.”
2. The summer 2010 issue of Trainer magazine includes a story by Bill Heller on the decline of fair racing. Seeing a Twitter exchange with @sidfernando on the subject, a correspondent emailed with tales of larceny past, like this one:
… the best story I can tell you is one that an old trainer I worked for at Suffolk told me. Summer of 1964, Brockton Fair, a mean old horse named Honest Count. They take him down there to run and the jockey bounces into the paddock and tells them, “Don’t waste your money betting on your horse today — I can’t let him run.”
Bill Finley wrote a marvelous column on the end of Northampton fair racing in 2005: “Thanks for the memories. They were something else.”
Links for 2010-06-29
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Fascinating results from the first year of the TJC equine injury database. "The analysis also showed female horses had a lower fatality rate than intact male horses; that females weren’t at increased risk when they compete against males; that 2-year-olds were less likely to break down than older horses; that there was no statistically significant difference in fatal injuries with various surface conditions." View the stats (PDF).
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More on TJC injury data. "This tells us the debate goes on." Pointlessly, for the moment. The data suggest the surface debate is a distraction, and that it’s better to focus on other factors for safety improvements.
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"Provenance is becoming more important in many fields I’ll outline in a moment. Why? Because it’s possible. And because it’s possible, it becomes expected. The link enables provenance: click here to see the source. The web enables provenance: search here to find out where this came from. The link economy requires provenance: link to support journalism at its source. The link ethic demands provenance. Period."
Links for 2010-06-28
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Paulick reports: "Dirt statistics from 2009 had an average of 0.39% CEDNFs per starter, so if the hypothetical meeting was strictly on a dirt track there would be 18 horses that didn’t finish and never raced/worked out again. A meeting conducting entirely on an all-weather/synthetic track, with a percentage of 0.19% CEDNFs, would have just nine non-finishers who never raced or worked again. An all-turf meeting would have 12 CEDNFs, based on the percentage of 0.26%. So, in 2009 at least, all-weather/synthetic tracks produced half the number of career-ending incidents than were recorded on dirt, and synthetics were even safer than turf." View the data (PDF). [But see: “We cannot identify a significant risk of fatality on dirt versus synthetic.” Researcher Tim Parkin tells Safety and Welfare Summit audience that TJC equine injury database doesn’t show a statistically significant difference between surfaces. Seems impossible to compare TOBA study to TJC due to differing criteria; more inclined to trust the latter.]
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"We’ve been waiting for revenue from gaming for eight or nine years now…. You can’t presume anything, but we are light years ahead of where we were two years ago. It’s been a very pleasant surprise how much institutional support there has been for Suffolk Downs." Conditions for expanded gaming in Massachusetts have never been better.
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"By toughening gambling laws and money-laundering sentences, the U.S. government pushed bookmakers offshore. The first time Dink opened a Daily Racing Form and saw advertisements for gambling parlors based in Antigua and the Dominican Republic, he couldn’t believe it. Bookmakers? Advertising? At worst it was a police scam, he thought, and at best it was a swindle." From the summer issue of Lapham's Quarterly, "Sports and Games," which includes a lovely photo of Man o' War.
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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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