ARCADIA, Calif. – There are Christmas decorations going up these days before Thanksgiving, and Christmas specials on the air by Veterans Day. Don’t deny it. You’ve seen them. You may even condone their existence. And while such trends do not signal that the apocalypse is upon us, it is definitely getting closer.
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DRF Past Performances
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – The 3-year-old competition leading to the Kentucky Derby will begin in earnest Sunday with the Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream Park. Racing fans can start speculating, as they do annually, whether the sport will produce a superstar and possibly even a Triple Crown winner.
Pssst. Don’t tell Sweet August Moon, but if she throws in a so-so race in the $250,000 Santa Monica Stakes on Sunday at Santa Anita Park, she’s got a date on the books with Smart Strike in Kentucky that any sensible mare would want to keep.
She has earned the right. Owned by Pete Parella’s Legacy Ranch and Team MacPherson, Sweet August Moon is 6 years old, with 20 starts and earnings just shy of half a million dollars. She is by the A.P. Indy stallion Malibu Moon, out of a Royal Academy mare, boasting a big, full-bodied carriage that screams of making beautiful babies.
LAS VEGAS – Welcome to the 11th annual ROI Awards. We usually hold this closer to the Eclipse Awards, but for the second straight year the hype surrounding the Horse of the Year made it hard for our little awards show to get any media coverage.
ROI stands for return on investment, and for our purposes it refers to the average payoff you would have received if you had wagered $2 to win on each of a horse’s races last year.
It’s easy to knock the winners of a restricted stakes race. After all, the concept of “restricted” does not exactly raise the gooseflesh when attached to an athletic endeavor, unless used in a sentence like, “The Super Bowl is restricted to the two biggest, meanest NFL teams left standing.”
Still, restrictions of participation need not necessarily eliminate the potential for excitement, or for the establishment of entertaining traditions. The Queen’s Plate is a restricted race, and yet look how it lifts the spirits of Canadians.
With so much of the nation frostbitten and bruised by killer winter storms, it seems the height of poor taste to go on and on about something called the Sunshine Millions on the final weekend in January.
Better that it be called the Less Miserable Millions, or the Chains Not Required Millions, or Light Jacket Toward Evening Millions rather than rubbing Sunshine in the faces of those who have been deprived of their local racing, from Hot Springs to Long Island.
TUCSON, Ariz. – After only three weeks of the new year, looking east at the racing and gaming landscape is like viewing a scarred battlefield.
In Florida, Calder Race Course and Gulfstream Park, eight miles apart, planning head-and-head conflicting winter dates thru the high tourist season from January until April.
There he was, dressed like Fred Astaire, cradling his freshly won Eclipse Award and beaming that Ramon Dominguez smile for the event’s official photographer the other night at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. In terms of dreams come true for a boy from Venezuela, this definitely qualified.
NEW YORK – The 2011 racing season began with two major changes on the parimutuel landscape: The absence of New York City OTB for the first time in four decades and a sharp takeout increase in California starting Jan. 1. If you were handicapping which would be more costly to the racing industry, the shuttering of the nation’s largest offtrack betting system would have seemed like the odds-on favorite.