DEL MAR, Calif. - The dog days of Del Mar have arrived. Summer is over. The tourists are gone. All that is left behind are a cluster of smoldering fire pits, used bottles of sunscreen strewn along the shore, and these last few afternoons of racing, played out before the local residents and the scavenging gulls. Even the fog has started to roll in.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Ever the gentleman, Eddie Delahoussaye was quick to recognize a lady in distress and allowed her to take his place in line.
Chivalry lives, even while awaiting a CT scan in the trauma unit of Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, where the rider was taken last Friday after a horrible fall on the Del Mar grass.
"She was having trouble with her pacemaker, and was starting to panic," Delahoussaye said. "I didn't think I was going to die, but I thought she had a chance of dying. She looked like she needed that scan a whole lot more than me."
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Outstanding performances by a talented colt and filly highlighted the closing weekend of a memorable meeting. The victories of Sky Mesa in the Grade 1 Hopeful and Awesome Humor in the Grade 1 Spinaway appear likely to cast a long shadow over the major 2-year-old racing this fall.
NEW YORK - When Saratoga closes for the year Monday, everyone who followed the meeting will have plenty of candidates for most memorable racing moment. The photo-finishes in the Diana and Test opening weekend. Left Bank's Whitney. Medaglia d'Oro's Travers. Whatever race on which you made your biggest score or took your toughest beat.
DEL MAR, Calif. - From The New York Times, dateline Washington, Aug. 28:
"The royal family [of Saudi Arabia] has considered presenting the racehorse that won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes this year as a gift to the victims' families, according to one advisor to the family. The horse, War Emblem, which was owned by Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who died in July, would be part of the commemoration at Ground Zero."
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - That dashing internationalist, Patrick Louis Biancone, reached into his capacious bag of 2-year-olds and selected the steady and talented Zavata, owned by Michael Tabor, to bid for Saturday's $200,000 Hopeful Stakes at seven furlongs at Saratoga.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Get ready for another edition of "The Man Show," Del Mar-style.
When last we tuned in to those three wacky hound dogs - Mike, Todd, and Frank - they were drooling into their TVG microphones over the appearance of Buffy Tyler in the Del Mar walking ring before the running of the Aug. 10 Sorrento Stakes. The former Playboy Playmate of the Month (an official title, by the way) was on hand to see the filly named in her honor, Buffythecenterfold.
Mike confessed he was having trouble maintaining his focus (not to mention eye contact).
DEL MAR, Calif. - There was a time, way back before sports turned Xtreme, when baseball and horse racing were the only big league games in town.
There was college football, sure, and a smattering of interest in golf, tennis, and track. But the NFL was an awkward infant, hockey was Canada's problem, and the NBA was a freak show filled with gawky white guys. Channel swimmers got more ink.
Amazing as it seems, at the midpoint of the 20th century, the most popular sports in America, practiced by professionals, were horse racing and baseball.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Two racing men who enjoyed considerable success return to Grade 1 competition Friday when Vasquez, carrying the Shortleaf Stable colors of John Ed Anthony of Hot Springs, Ark., and trained by John Veitch, bids for the $200,000 Spinaway Stakes for 2-year-old fillies at seven furlongs.
TUCSON, Ariz. - Gary Biszantz may have shattered the serenity of a Saratoga Sunday morning with his Jockey Club Round Table speech on overuse of medication and the role of some veterinarians in creating it, but the impact of his remarks won't be known until racing sees what happens next.
Industry leaders reacted with seeming relief and satisfaction that a prominent colleague publicly proclaimed what many of them obviously had been thinking, judging from their rousing response to Biszantz's remarks.