Been mad busy lately, thank God people are still suing each other at the drop of a hat
and producing mounds of paperwork....
Went to Belmont live last Sat and it was great to buy a program and not see Hayward\'s
name on the masthead.
Lots of fun in today\'s DRF: specifically the piece about the Canadian slaughterhouse
which will no longer accept thoroughbreds, Hovdey\'s piece on the knee jerk NY reaction
of instituting a Belmont stakes only detention barn regimen.
Having spent seven years in and out of racetrack dorm rooms, I must say my favorite
article involved Calder (a CD subsidiary) announcing that it was going to begin
charging $5 per day for backstretch workers to stay in dorm rooms. One commenter
succinctly noted that given the small size of Calder dorm rooms, when measured by the
square foot, these squalid quarters would become among the most expensive residential
rental real estate in the surrounding area.
Not commented on in these parts, but discussed in the NY Post and DRF, the Belmont
favorite being stripped of his nasal strip.
Great article in the NY Post discussing the fact that O\'Neill has not worked IHA
since the Preakness, and that apparently he will not have a significant work between
Preakness and Belmont. The Post article listed Secretariat\'s works during his Triple
Crown campaign. To understate, they were rather impressive. I do not want to enter
the argument if racehorses are faster now than then, and I am too young to have seen
Dr. Fager, but I do not know if any horse was, is or will be as fast as Secretariat
was during his Triple Crown races.
Wonderful quote by O\'Neill after the Derby win: If a colt with IHA\'s PPs and #s had
been trained by Pletcher and ridden by Johhny V, he would have been no more than 5/1
at post time for the Derby. True.
Crowd for the Belmont: How much will it be promoted in the next week? Who will be
responsible for promoting it? I think 120,00 saw Smarty get denied in 2004; in 2008,
between 80,000 - 90,000 saw Big Brown come acropper. After the race we heard that
there were death threats on the colt, the jockey, the trainer and the owners as
Tricky and the IEAH braintrust injected some WWF into the Triple Crown.
Chaos. Sarava. Da Tara. Birdstone. Commendable. Pletcher getting his first Triple
Crown winner with a filly.
IHA, the contender, likely 4/5. UR, second fave, still hasn\'t lived up to his
potential. Dullahan, bit of a wise guy horse, never won on dirt but going out for a
trainer who seems to be pressing all the right buttons. And then the agents of Chaos.
And thinking back to some of the Belmonts I attended live: Avatar, Affirmed, Colonial
Affair. And thinking ahead to how much of a bribe I am going have to give my wife and
mother in law to leave Living Room Downs for a few hours next Saturday.
A little more than seven days (and less than 2 months till the Spaaah). Sitting here
in a windowless room high above Manhattan, I can smell the ammonia like odor from the
urine soaked straw, the Bigel oil, the hundreds of gallons of spilled beer on the
frontside, the stairwells at Belmont that smell like a sidewalk in Kingston,
Jamaica;as General George S Patton said about war (at least George C Scott
said it in the movie) \"God help me, I do love it so.\"
