If you are a trainer operating a public stable and feel compelled to have any style at all in terms of public image, Del Mar is a challenge.

You pass through the main gate of the barn area driving over a cattle guard. When you leave, you can only turn right. Parking is a crapshoot, most of it on dirt. The barns themselves – except for the multi-purpose monstrosities nearest the grandstand – escape attention for pretty much the entire 10 months since the previous closing day. Graffiti lingers from year to year, some of it dating back to the Clinton administration.

For starters, it is important to point out that Rosie Napravnik does not get hurt every time she comes off a horse. It only seems that way.

She got right to her feet last Nov. 6 on the first turn of the Churchill Downs grass course when her mount in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf, Rough Sailing, skidded and fell. Napravnik’s concern was immediately for her horse, and rightly so. Although he got up and trotted off, Rough Sailing was injured beyond repair.

LAS VEGAS – As of noon Thursday, the Main Event is under way.

For poker fans, that’s all I really have to say. For those who need more explanation, it’s the World Series of Poker’s $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold’em Championship, the most coveted tournament title in the poker world, the one that started at Binion’s Horseshoe in 1970 and made legends of Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, Johnny Chan, Phil Helmuth, and the accountant/online poker player named Chris Moneymaker, who sparked the poker boom in 2003.

Some races are tailor-made for the inclinations of certain trainers. When it came to Woody Stephens it was the Belmont Stakes, which he won five times in five years. Charlie Whittingham owned the San Juan Capistrano, America’s longest major race on grass, with 14 winners spread out over 32 seasons. For Bob Baffert it has been the Del Mar Futurity, nine of them so far, including seven in a row.

As the excitement of the holiday fades, along with the smell of festive gunpowder, there are more than a couple reasons to keep the celebrations going.

On Wednesday, when entries were to be taken for Saturday’s 72nd running of the Hollywood Gold Cup, the name of Twirling Candy was going to be among them. He is the best older male in the West, but even so, the race won’t be a walkover. Far from it, especially with Santa Anita combatants Game On Dude and Setsuko in the field, along with the new and improved version of First Dude and the distance-loving mare Miss Match.

The story should have driven racing’s Richter scale past the 9.0 mark.

It was an earthquake, but it didn’t move the needle.

It was a short column written by a man who writes very little on Thoroughbred racing, but who shakes up harness racing with his offerings from time to time in a rising newsletter called Harness Racing Update and another in Australia called Harness Link.

The most exciting encounter between Bill Shoemaker and Triple Bend took place in the 1972 Santa Anita Handicap, a race so cool you still can find it on YouTube (although it still trails All-Time Skateboarding Bailouts by about half a million views).

A pretty good gray horse named Buzkashi – owned by Hollywood Park’s new CEO, Marjorie Everett – spooked shortly after the start from his inside post that day, veered left and hurdled the temporary guide rail leading out of the stretch chute.

The late Steve Allen, talk show host and all-around entertaining smart aleck, loved to toy with the literal absurdities of the English language. One of his favorites:

"My next guest is a man who needs no introduction . . . so here he is."

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the raceday administration of Lasix should be continued, modified or phased out in American racing, but two aspects of the current debate about it simply don’t pass the smell test.

It took this reporter a full year for it to sink in, that the Beverly Hills Handicap, once a jewel in the crown of the summer Hollywood Park season, has been rendered to the lowest rung on that wobbly ladder known as the list of graded American stakes.