NEW YORK - We have 84 days to figure out who's going to win the 131st Kentucky Derby, but a far less leisurely time frame to get down on Pool 1 of Derby Futures betting, which closes Sunday evening. There are two sure things about the bet:
* Most of the 23 horses available for individual wagers this weekend will be off the Derby trail by the big day.
* This bet would be a whole lot more fun if you could choose from more than 23 horses.
ARCADIA, Calif. - About this time last year, Mike Pegram let it slip that he had a real nice 2-year-old filly down on the farm in Florida, where J.B. and Kevin McKathan prepare the young Pegram runners for eventual racing careers.
"This is the only Grade 1 winner ever bred to Real Quiet," Pegram said, referring to the mating of his Kentucky Derby winner and his Citidancer mare Hookedonthefeelin. "The boys say she's a real runner - the best of the bunch."
ARCADIA, Calif. - Now that the names of the lucky 358 Triple Crown nominees have been announced, Kentucky Derby Fever is officially sweeping the land.
The symptoms are consistent with most viral maladies, notorious for lying in wait and hiding in dark corners of the bloodstream until stress, exhaustion, or a call from Jay Privman and his "Derby Doings" triggers a relapse.
TUCSON, Ariz. - Thoroughbred racing's sudden concern about milkshaking, and the rush of jurisdictions that have ignored it for years to now urgently do something about it, is symptomatic of the most dangerous problem in racing today.
But the bicarbonate brouhaha is the tip of the iceberg.
Milkshaking - the administration of sodium bicarbonate to reduce the buildup of lactic acid and ensuing fatigue - is like addition and subtraction in first grade. It is where things start, not where they end.
ARCADIA, Calif. - In the best of all possible worlds, untroubled by temptation or pride, the results of the over the weekend would flow smoothly into the mix for the $1 million Santa Anita Handicap next month.
This is the natural order of things, the way they are meant to be. Testing, 1 1/8-mile preliminaries on the first weekend in February, followed by 1 1/4 miles for all the money on the first glorious Saturday in March and a place in the history books alongside Seabiscuit, Round Table, John Henry, and Affirmed.
NEW YORK - Who was the fastest 2-year-old you ever saw? First love can be blinding, so I can't claim utter objectivity when I say it was Devil's Bag, who died at Claiborne Farm Thursday morning at the age of 24. Still, 22 years after his championship season, my eyes and my numbers haven't seen one better.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Now that Alex Solis has toured the length of the Western Hemisphere, scaled the mountains near his Glendora home a couple hundred times, and consumed enough fine wine to turn most people sideways, it's time to go back to work. The deadbeat.
Solis was scheduled to get off the dole on Saturday with two mounts at Santa Anita and then on Sunday with another three. Compared to his normal workload, this barely qualifies as Solis-level labor, but he's not complaining.
ARCADIA, Calif. - What's the point of having a $300,000 race restricted to 4-year-olds when one of them is Rock Hard Ten? Why not just cut the check and move on to the next race?
So goes the conventional wisdom, especially in the wake of Rock Hard Ten's mastery of the Malibu Stakes at Santa Anita on opening day. So decisive was his victory that those in his wake shuffled back to their barns, apologizing for all the bother and grateful merely to be nominated.
NEW YORK - Frank Stronach's intentions may well be good when he calls on racing to determine its Eclipse Awards via point systems rather than polling, and the same goes for the people trying to impose a system of World Thoroughbred Rankings onto the sport. In racing as in life, however, trying to cram subjective matters into tidy objective compartments rarely works out very well.
