Family is not the most important thing in Thoroughbred horse racing, but just try getting from the quarter pole home on Derby Day without it.
In that regard, the freshly minted Chloe Jane Hyland, born Jan. 5, 2012, will find herself right at home when she starts hanging around a racetrack or a TV truck.
“Mangled Horses, Maimed Jockeys,” a 6,400-word article splashed across the front-page of last Sunday’s New York Times, might have been a fair and useful piece of investigative journalism had it stuck to its scope: Rates of equine injuries and fatalities at some tracks, particularly Quarter Horse venues in the Southwest, are alarmingly high. There also are legitimate questions about the quality of oversight and regulation in an era when some of these tracks are operated by casino companies whose primary interest in racing is to secure licenses for their slot-machine operations.
Thoroughbred racing badly needs a 3-year-old star.
The sport’s popularity – as everybody knows – has been declining for years. Racing gets minimal attention on network television, and it has disappeared from most sports pages during most of the year.
When Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes in 1973, ending a Triple Crown drought dating back to Citation’s run in 1948, he was hailed as a sports hero on a par with all-pro icons and Olympic greats.
When Seattle Slew came along to win the Triple Crown in 1977, his feat was greeted with something less than Secretariat-level enthusiasm but nevertheless was praised as a grand achievement, especially since the colt was undefeated, and very cool.
People in the Thoroughbred racing industry woke up on Sunday morning to find their sport under siege. The New York Times published a photo on Page 1 that depicted a horse dead on the track; it accompanied a lengthy investigative report blaming “drugs and lax oversight” for a high rate of fatal breakdowns.
On the same day, the Los Angeles Times covered the same topic, detailing the death toll at Santa Anita this winter. These two news reports came only a week after the abrupt cancellation of HBO’s “Luck,” when a third horse died during the filming of the TV series.
Everyone complains that American racing does a poor job of providing a clear path of major events for its older horses until the end of the season, and one look at the 2012 national racing calendar confirms that they’re right: There are no Grade 1 route races for older males between the Santa Anita Handicap in early March and the Stephen Foster at Churchill Downs in mid-June.
He said it and nailed it on the nose.
“Eight hundred thousand isn’t what it used to be,” insisted Dustin Dix, Sunland Park director of racing operations and the man who put together the $800,000 Sunland Derby, to be run Sunday at Sunland Park.
It’s tournament time.
I’m actually talking about horse racing handicapping tournaments. Sure, the NCAA basketball tournament is cutting down to the Final Four this weekend, but it won’t be long before college basketball gets put on the backburner for a lot of people until next March Madness.
The Triple Crown season starts for real this weekend. How do I know? Follow the money.
On Saturday, at Turfway Park in northern Kentucky, the Vinery Racing Spiral Stakes offers a purse of $500,000. On Sunday, just down the road from El Paso and across the New Mexico state line, there will be $800,000 up for grabs in the Sunland Park Derby. Is this a great country or what?
This is the way it used to work:
William Collins Whitney, the 19th-century political heavyweight and New York cable car magnate, did not get interested in Thoroughbred racing until his late 50’s. When he did, it was with a vengeance, and in the few years he had left (he died in 1904, at 63) W.C. Whitney led the American owner’s list twice and won the Epsom Derby.
