Let’s hear it for the girls. No division is deeper this season in California than the one populated by older fillies and mares.

For $300,000 the very best of them – minus champion Blind Luck – will gather on Saturday at Santa Anita for the Santa Margarita Invitational and a chance to go down in history alongside names like Busher, Two Lea, Silver Spoon, Gamely, Gallant Bloom, Susan’s Girl, Tizna, Lady’s Secret, Bayakoa, Paseana, Azeri, and last year’s winner, Horse of the Year Zenyatta (aka Mrs. Bernardini).

If you’re like most college basketball fans, you have been following all the action in the conference tournaments the past few weeks as March Madness is well under way.

This all leads up to Selection Sunday, March 13, when the NCAA’s field of 68 will be announced. That was a weird sentence to write. I never got used to writing or saying “65-team field” and now this year is the first with 68.

For those who like their racing entertainment leaning in the direction of food fights and “Dukes of Hazzard” reruns, the Santa Anita Handicap of last Saturday was made to order. It had everything but a guy in armor hitting Richard Mandella over the head with a rubber chicken.

Too bad, then, that the mosh pit moment provided by Game On Dude, Twirling Candy, and Setsuko served to wipe quickly from memory one of those gorgeous racing displays, wherein horses and jockeys rise to the occasion and leave the stage aglow. That was the Kilroe Mile.

The earthquake in New Zealand that wrecked Addington Raceway in Christchurch and forced transfer of Australasia's $800,000 Interdominion championships to Alexandra Park in Auckland was more severe, but did not generate as many tremors here as the ones that shook Santa Anita last Saturday.

The news that Michael Martinez was getting married on Friday to Charlotte Garcia, the mother of their five-month-old daughter, was greeted by his uncle, Alex Solis, with a mixture of joy and sadness.

Joy at the prospect of the union, entered into even amidst the most difficult of circumstances. And sadness over the ongoing reality that Martinez, just 24, remains paralyzed from the waist down as a result of an accident last September at Golden Gate Fields, nine days before his daughter was born.

In the balloting for 2010 Eclipse Awards, 17 voters chose Jerry Hollendorfer as the nation’s outstanding trainer, the third highest number of first-place votes behind Todd Pletcher’s 168 and John Shirreffs’s 28. Bob Baffert received only one first-place vote. Yet when the three finalists for the title were announced in early January, they were Pletcher, Baffert, and Shirreffs.

The fallout from Thursday’s most informative Dubai World Cup Preview Night at Meydan suggests we are in for one of the more action-packed World Cup Nights in history March 26.

From some angles, Twirling Candy could have gone the Charlie Sheen route, squandering the advantages of good breeding and ample opportunity by indulging in behaviors of questionable worth.

According to the inflation calculator on my iPad – not as cool as the Justin Bieber app, I know – $100,000 in 1935 would be worth $1.6 million in purchasing power today. This means the $750,000 Santa Anita Handicap is a long way from keeping up standards set when it was first run 76 years ago, when it was the first U.S. race to offer a hundred grand. But it’s still the richest handicap in the land, along with the similarly endowed Whitney, and that has got to count for something.

SANTIAGO, Chile – Hipodromo Chile is a modest racetrack in many respects, but a fan in the grandstand will look onto one of the most spectacular backdrops in all of the sport, with the Andes Mountains looming over the backstretch. When the air is clear and the snow-capped peaks in the distance are visible, the vista at the little Hipodromo is even more majestic than Santa Anita’s.