ARCADIA, Calif. - The crafty veteran David Penna, now gone, once took a promising apprentice for a walk on the track during a quiet moment before first post one day at Tampa Bay Downs. The apprentice was developing a habit of blowing turns and still winning races, so Penna figured it was time for an object lesson in Jockey 101, before it was too late.

"Do you see this?" Penna asked, gently patting the rail.

"Yeah, yeah, I do," replied the wide-eyed bug.

"This is the inside rail," Penna explained. "The object is to stay as close to this as possible."

ARCADIA, Calif. - Anytime is a good time to write about Affirmed, except this time. This time his name must be entwined with the loss of the man who shepherded Affirmed through the final decade of his life, John A. Bell III, who died on Wednesday in a Lexington hospice. He was 88.

NEW YORK - Is the headline "Hong Kong Front-runner to Host 2009 Breeders' Cup"

a) The lead story in an April Fool's Day spoof edition of Daily Racing Form?

b) Fake news from the satirists at The Onion or The Daily Show?

c)An actual headline from the South China Morning Post, the largest English-language newspaper in Hong Kong?

NEW YORK - The Eclipse Award results announced Monday night in Beverly Hills, Calif., included some heartening landslides and fascinating squeakers, but only one result that may have indicated a sea change in the way that racing chooses its champions.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Now that Lava Man has made a swift and sure return to the races, the spotlight shifts to Saturday's Donn Handicap at Gulfstream Park, where Horse of the Year Invasor makes his first start of the season. These are the grown-ups, the elephants in the room, and anyone who wants to make an impact will need to deal with them eventually.

NEW YORK - While the three Triple Crown races each spring are widely considered the sport's signature events, eight other races across the country in the course of the year have crowned the Horse of the Year in recent seasons.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Mike Willman is resisting the idea that he has become an overnight working-class hero. But what else do you call a recently divorced single parent holding down a middle management racetrack job who has suddenly found out what it's like to live the same crazy dream he's been watching others enjoy for years?

Unlike movies and books about the sport, real-life horse racing does not often produce stories with happy and satisfying endings. Modern Thoroughbreds are so fragile that people who spend their lives around the animals always brace themselves for the worst of outcomes.

But even for the most hardened racetrackers, the death of Barbaro Monday was a painful and depressing loss. The catastrophic injury that the colt suffered in the Preakness, followed by his euthanization eight months later, constituted a double blow.

Above and beyond his skill as an equine surgeon, it is to the everlasting credit of Dr. Dean Richardson that at no point during the last eight months did he lead anyone to believe that the Barbaro story was going to turn out all right.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Now that sprinting fillies and mares have been sanctified with a Breeders' Cup race of their own, perhaps it's time to start paying close attention to the Santa Monica Handicap again.

Played at seven furlongs in late January, the Santa Monica held its own as a major event for a long stretch of runnings, thanks to such winners as Bug Brush, Silver Spoon, Typecast, Chou Croute, and Tizna. Any one of those mares could anchor a rotisserie dream team.