TUCSON, Ariz. – Reading the eulogy for Santa Anita’s Pro-Ride synthetic track delivered last week by the track’s president, George Haines, as heavy equipment began tearing the ersatz strip to shreds, brought back a flood of memories.
They began in the little town of Mechanicsburg, Pa., where I worked as a high school kid helping build a huge wartime arsenal of military supplies and ammunition at the start of World War II.
NEW YORK – T he announcement last week that Frank Stronach is moving five stallions, including Touch Gold, to New York was more than a footnote about relocating breeding stock. It was a vote of confidence by a major industry player in what seems like a suddenly brighter outlook for New York Thoroughbred racing and breeding.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Three weeks from Sunday, on the clear, cool Kentucky morning of Nov. 7, the racing world will awaken with all matters resolved. Horse of the Year will be decided. The lesser divisions will be nailed shut. Horse racing can safely tuck itself away in its winter cave and wait for the emergence of spring, or the release of “Secretariat” on DVD, whichever comes first.
NEW YORK – Goldikova is the best horse in the world. In winning the Prix de la Foret at Longchamp on Oct. 3 she set a European record of 11 Group or Grade 1 victories. That is one more than the total racked up by the filly to which she is most often compared, Miesque. No European-trained horse has won as many such races since the group race system was introduced in 1971.
Most of the time it is pretty easy to comply with the hard and fast house rule of Thoroughbred racing – the one that goes, “What have you done for me lately?” Still, there are tales told that from time to time need faithful revisitation, if only for the simple fact that they failed to provide satisfactory endings. Here are three of them, from the not-so-distant past:
LAS VEGAS – We are through five weeks of the NFL season and the sports books here are enjoying their best year in recent memory.
This isn’t surprising as the public tends to bet favorites (especially in parlays) and underdogs haven’t had a losing week yet and are hitting at an unheard of 55 percent clip at 47-36-2 against the spread. That doesn’t tell the whole story as the books have also been benefiting from wise-guy steam plays that have gone down in flames over and over.
For the record, at least in the service of demographic accuracy, it should be noted that even though it felt as if I were the youngest person in the audience late Tuesday afternoon for a discount showing of Disney’s “Secretariat” at the local Ultrastar Theater, I wasn’t. There was also a little girl, who said she was eight, enjoying the movie two rows behind me and to the left. With her grandmother.
It probably didn’t start with the Gold Rush of 1849, but it’s been going strong ever since. California, as a physical concept, is always in play. People just seem to want a piece of it, preferably coastal, with some kind of view, but the desert is okay, and then there’s the mountains, and here and there a stream. When can we open escrow?
NEW YORK – When Frank Stronach testified before the California Horse Racing Board last June, the chairman of MI Developments, owner of Santa Anita and other tracks, spoke in generalities about how the sport needed changes. Board members pressed him for a specific example or proposal, and he finally came up with one:
“A quadruple quadfecta,” said Stronach. “That’s maybe why we could offer a $20 million jackpot.”
What’s the point, really? The money spends, sure, and anyone in the racing game would love to have a trophy engraved as the winner of the Shadwell Mile or the Oak Tree Mile. But then what? It’s on to Louisville for the Breeders’ Cup Mile, where a dozen or so very nice horses will scramble around the Churchill Downs turf course for the honor of running second to the two-time defending champ, Goldikova.