WASHINGTON - Tim Schneider is an experienced horseplayer, but at Turfway Park he made the mistake that costs America's bettors millions of dollars per year. He bought a winning parimutuel ticket - and never cashed it.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - With the wounded Hollywood Park fall season in its last throes, it comes as a pleasant surprise to look up and see a first-class stakes event decorating the final Sunday of the meet.

NEW YORK - Aqueduct closes for nine days starting Monday, coincidentally reopening the same day Eclipse Award ballots are due. That sounds like just about enough time to figure out the few remaining questions over who should be named champions of their divisions for 2005.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - John Adger recalls the conversation as if it happened yesterday, when one of the richest men in Texas wanted him to come over and talk about horses.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - On Wednesday, Dec. 7, a dark brown female Thoroughbred named Star Parade finished up the track in a $30,000 maiden claimer at Turfway Park.

Then, four days later and some 1,900 miles to the west, a dark brown female Thoroughbred named Star Parade surfaced at Hollywood Park to win the Bayakoa Handicap by four lengths against a field that included major stakes winners Dream of Summer and Island Fashion.

Conspiracy, or coincidence?

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The NTRA is asking once again that racing fans step forward to nominate their most memorable moment of the year and send it along for consideration.

The contest was inspired by the image of Chris Antley cradling Charismatic's broken leg while emergency personnel rushed to help the colt in the aftermath of the

1999 Belmont Stakes. The heart-rending mix of compassion, tragedy, and instinctive horsemanship embodied by that particular scene was unlike any other public moment in horse racing that season.

TUCSON, Ariz. - Jim Whelan, president of the Ontario Harness Horse Association, spoke at last week's Racing Symposium here in Tucson, and his remarks triggered sparks of memory.

Whelan said he perceives a growing antagonism between the province of Ontario, which operates slot machines at 16 tracks in the province, and the tracks and horsemen who benefit from them.

He said horsemen in Ontario are beginning to fear that racing will be pushed aside as the government looks for other ways to use the slot receipts.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Ballots for the Eclipse Awards were mailed this week to 324 lucky voters, all of them fully versed on the major players of the 2005 season and prepared to render fair and solemn judgements.

There are slam dunks (Pletcher, Velazquez, Lost in the Fog) and tangled webs of confusion (3-year-old filly, male turf horse), but at least the names are familiar and their qualifications apparent.

NEW YORK - The New York Racing association made a bad call Thursday, cancelling Friday's Aqueduct card nearly 24 hours before post time due to bad touting from the meteorologists. Apparently "three to six inches of snow and sleet" is weathermanese for "clear and sunny."

But NYRA made dozens of good calls Wednesday, announcing a 2006 stakes schedule full of significant revisions that will jar some traditionalists but were mostly necessary and overdue.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - The timing probably could have been better, and the two stories were unrelated. Still, the back-to-back headlines tended to bleed into each other last week when Victor Conte, the chemist behind baseball's BALCO steroid scandal, began serving a four-month prison sentence on the same day that trainer Doug O'Neill revealed that multiple stakes winner Whilly would be withdrawn from consideration for this Sunday's $2.3 million Hong Kong Cup because there were trace levels of an anabolic steroid in his prerace blood test.