NEW YORK - The announcement Thursday that the qualifying contests for the DRF/NTRA National Handicapping Championship are being linked as a yearlong NHC Tour is good news for tournament enthusiasts. There will be separate prize pools beyond each contest for the Tour leaders at year's end, additional incentive for players who have qualified early in the year to keep entering subsequent tournaments, and a $2 million bonus if the Tour winner goes on to capture the main event.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Any sympathetic observer would have been watching the Santa Ynez Stakes at Santa Anita last Sunday with a certain amount of alarm. Two fillies were clawing at each other at level weights, with heavily-favored Indian Blessing under attack from Golden Doc A, and running faster than any pair of classy 3-year-old fillies had ever run before. Surely, something had to break.

ARCADIA, Calif. - It must have been a strange feeling, but for the first time since Jan. 1, 2005, Doug O'Neill woke up on a New Year's Day without Lava Man munching hay somewhere in the barn.

NEW YORK - The drainage problem with Santa Anita's Cushion Track, which caused racing to be canceled last weekend and will force the track to be torn up and reinstalled at some point, have reopened the debate over synthetic surfaces in American racing. Yet much of the debate has centered on the wrong point.

ARCADIA, Calif. - The bad news lingers. Last weekend's racing at Santa Anita was lost. But the weather was lousy, at least on Saturday and Sunday, and only the hardest of the hard-core were prepared to brave the elements.

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - Florida horseplayers, and snowbirds who used to plan winter vacations around the racing there, will never forgive Magna Entertainment for transforming Gulfstream Park from a spacious and classical racetrack into a claustrophobic maze of a racino. Now in their third winter of discontent, the remaining regulars continue to complain about the facilities, which remain in a constant state of construction and rearrangement.

ARCADIA, Calif. - If it is true that misery loves company, the beleaguered bunch dealing with the Cushion Track mess at Santa Anita Park might want to give the U.S. Air Force a call. Structural flaws in the workhorse F-15 fighter jets temporarily grounded the fleet of 700 last November when one of them broke apart during a mock dogfight. Nearly 200 are still in suspicious condition, gathering cobwebs on the tarmac.

ARCADIA, Calif. - It is hard to believe, but the Cushion Track mess at Santa Anita Park actually has folks pining for the bad old days of sealed California dirt tracks.

Fractured legs, tattered heels, cracked and bruised feet - how soon we forget the physical toll taken by wet winters spent pounding on the pavement that used to pass for a racing surface. Synthetic tracks were supposed to end all that, giving the horses and their caretakers more benign practice and playing fields, even when the weather went south. It was a great idea, and it still is.

TUCSON, Ariz. - Relations between harness racing and Thoroughbred racing in this country, for the most part, follow roughly the old Bostonian axiom, which loosely quoted was:

And this is good old Boston,

The land of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells speak only to Lowells

And the Cabots speak only to God.

ARCADIA, Calif. - It was 9:30 a.m. Friday, the calm before the storm, and Santa Anita Park was eerily quiet. The action, what there was of it, was taking place on the dark sand of the infield training track, far removed from anyone viewing from the grandstand ramp. Reports from the north trickled in, overheard in bits of cell-phone chatter.

"How hard?"

"Are they racing?"