WASHINGTON - Horse racing's worst scandal is over. The perpetrators of the Breeders' Cup Pick Six fix are going to jail, and the rightful winners are about to receive their money.
Yet the resolution of the case has outraged racing fans almost as much as the original offense. The central figure in the scheme will spend less than a year in a minimum-security federal prison after trying to pull off a multimillion-dollar fraud.
ARCADIA, Calif. - The idea of getting on an airplane in Los Angeles, changing flights in London, and then heading directly into the most dangerous part of the world should give a sensible person pause.
Meet Gary Stevens, one sensible person.
There is no race on earth that Stevens would like to win more than a Dubai World Cup, and there is no program like the World Cup program for showering untold riches upon jockeys, trainers, and their patrons. Stevens has been there often enough to know what he is missing.
NEW YORK - Anyone want to help me steal $3 million? All you have to do is open a couple of Capitol OTB phone accounts and I will take care of the rest. C'mon, it will be fun, and it's a sweet deal for me if we get caught: I will rat you out and only get 312 days in the pokey while you will get two to three years.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - Bigger than life.
Before Juddmonte Farm shipped the Unbridled colt out of Toussaud to Bobby Frankel in New York last summer, farm manager Garrett O'Rourke phoned the trainer and told him the winner of the 2003 Kentucky Derby was on his way.
Frankel knows about enthusiasm and usually prefers to see for himself.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - It's a good thing the sun is not scheduled to blow up for another zillion or so years, because that means one attraction of the Florida winter racing scene will stay the same for a while longer. There's no sweeter place for a snowbird to spend a weekend in March, especially after this unusually brutal winter.
Yet it's hard to visit Florida at this time of the year without feeling a sense of loss for the absence of a couple of things that only a generation ago made the Sunshine State seem like pure parimutuel paradise.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - Over the last 20 years, only four winners of the Fountain of Youth Stakes have gone on to complete a double in the $1 million Florida Derby, as Einar P. Robsham's Trust N Luck will attempt to do Saturday.
"It would be nice to make it five out of twenty-one," trainer Ralph Ziadie said.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Mark Johnston is an Eclipse Award-winning jockey of respectable reputation and healthy common sense who has made a name for himself on the Maryland circuit competing against the likes of Edgar Prado and Rick Wilson. Johnston knows how to win (3,038 to date) and works hard for his money, so it is no surprise that he has decided to pick up stakes and try California at the prime-time age of 32. Only one real question remains.
Is he nuts?
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - When Grand Hombre made his debut at Gulfstream Park, readers of the Daily Racing Form might have concluded that the colt couldn't outrun a fat man.
An unraced 3-year-old, Grand Hombre showed three workouts that had been recorded at the Classic Mile Training Center in Ocala, Fla. He had worked a half-mile in 53 seconds, another half-mile in the identical time, and a half-mile in 54.60 seconds. At that speed he would barely get work pulling a hansom cab in Central Park.
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. - I am celebrating what is happening this week in Florida, where Thoroughbred and harness people are sitting down together and talking to one another about their mutual, and parimutuel, problems. They will discover they are one and the same.