Your browser does not support iframes

It turned out to be not much of a contest, that showdown at Glorious Goodwood on Wednesday, where Canford Cliffs brought a butter knife to a gunfight with Frankel.

In an effort to cultivate a new and expanded wave of fans, horse racing has been pretty good about choosing the laundry it decides to wash in public.

The light was beginning to fade on Del Mar’s opening day as “America’s No. 1 Thoroughbred” lurked at the back of her stall, thinking strange horse thoughts and wondering what to do next.

The barn was quiet. The view had not changed, and Blind Luck had grown weary of torturing her hay net. She had done nothing but walked since getting back from Delaware Park, where her razor-thin win over Havre de Grace in the Delaware Handicap last Saturday continued to sending dizzying waves of excitement through the sport. But that was then. What now? More hay?

In most years recently, the Saratoga Race Course meeting has begun amid bigger questions about New York racing than who was going to win all the important races being held at the historic old track on Union Avenue between late July and Labor Day.

And then there were nine . . . but it took a little longer than expected.

The World Series of Pokers’ $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold’Em World Championship – commonly referred to as the Main Event – played down to its final nine players Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning at the Rio All-Suites Hotel & Casino just west of the Las Vegas Strip.

My last offering – on author Andrew Cohen and his raising the issue of the French blood-booster ITPP – drew a lively response.

I asked Cohen, after he had reported on the likelihood that it could be affecting, and infecting, U.S. racing, what kind of a response his column drew. He said two major hitters had privately expressed interest in helping out, but that otherwise “Crickets. No one did or said anything.”

I interpreted that response as silence, and said so here.

Fans arriving early enough Wednesday for Del Mar’s opening program will be treated to the sight of the traditional team photo being shot in the walking ring, when the jockeys of the Del Mar colony gather in colorful riding regalia for as formal a portrait as possible under the conditions.

Most of the faces will be familiar at a glance. There’s Rosario, Bejarano, Talamo, Gomez, Flores, Valenzuela, Pedroza, Espinoza, Sutherland, Garcia, Quinonez, Baze . . . and, um, that guy over there, with the blue eyes and the head of Hollywood hair.

In the course of making regular visits to the gravesite of his mother at El Camino Memorial Park in Sorrento Valley near Del Mar, Barry Abrams began to notice, on more than one occasion, a man on a blanket beside a grave marker not far away.

“He was laying there every evening I was there, and I got to wondering about him,” Abrams said. “The marker read ‘Sean Robins.’ He parked behind me, and on his license plate was ‘Seany Foundation.’ I looked it up. The next time I saw him there, I introduced myself.”

The announcement Thursday that the Breeders’ Cup will ban raceday medications including Lasix from its juvenile races in 2012, and from all its races beginning in 2013, was a bold and historic move that raises a number of short- and long-term questions.

Let’s start with one of each: Is it likely to affect the fields for those races and how the horses will perform? And will the ban be an isolated, symbolic gesture affecting only 15 of the 30,000 or so races run in this country each year, or will it lead to changes in the other 29,985?

Anyone who loves a good racetrack rumble needs to drop what he’s doing at around five o’clock Eastern time Saturday afternoon and get a load of those two throwing down at Delaware Park.

Old school is definitely in session.

Blind Luck and Havre de Grace are fillies who run and never hide, especially from each other. Fate popped them out of the same 2007 Thoroughbred crop, and now here they are, four years later, meeting for the sixth time under serious circumstances in the $750,000 Delaware Handicap.