The draw

The manner in which horses are entered in a particular race and assigned post positions has gone largely unchanged for generations. Above, horsemen & racing officials huddle around the racing office counter while entry cards, each representing a horse, are pulled from the box (right) and numbered pills are pulled from a shake bottle (held by pill-puller, left). Which ever pill number is pulled for a given entry card will be that horse's post position. Each pill is then placed in the corresponding numbered divot on the makeshift board as seen here on the counter. The purpose of the board is to allow everyone to see which number was pulled instead of the puller announcing it and dumping it into a less circumspect vessel. This reduces the ease, and possibly the likelihood, of chicanery in the assignment of post positions.

While less common now, given dwindling field sizes, occasionally a race over fills. This means not all horses entered will be assigned a post position or a placing on the also eligible list. Assuming all horses have equal preference, those not pulled, and thus not assigned a post position number or placing on the also eligible list, will not have a chance to run in the race. Such horses are said to have been "left in the box."

The same type of bottle and pills are used to determine which party claims a horse when more than one claim is dropped for a particular horse. On TVG or HRTV, when you hear "trainer Hai Bute took Cheap Speed out of the fourth in a three-way shake" that merely means three claims were dropped and Cheap Speed will now be in the care of Mr. Bute.

*pic circa 1950, Cumberland Racetrack

Racetrack card game

Every race day an unorganized card game breaks out in the kitchen by mid morning. Sometimes there are two games. They mostly play Gin, but pert' near always it's gonna be some conception of a meld game. Oh, you wanna know which track? Doesn't matter. They played Gin at Fairmount Park in the 80s. I dropped a couple Lincolns to some eager grooms in a three handed pinochle game at Pimlico better than a decade ago, but only because they were playing for lower stakes than the horsemen at the rummy tables.

Gin was by far the dominate game at every track in Chile and Argentina. I did catch some riders playing hearts at the track in Rio. Euchre was popular with the jocks in northern England and I've seen a hand or two of point-trick games played on at least one backstretch in every hemisphere. Even so, I've never seen so much as one game of bridge. Rio or Saigon or Berkeley, Calif, you have to remember: These are hard men living hard lives. They know the risks, they want action, and have no use for a rubber.

Fav new dev tool

Racing folk don't give a leaking flap barb about this, and if you maintain a site, you probably already use it, but googlelabs browser size is pretty effing useful.

Pic of the day - repost from 2 years ago

A Christmas Eve lawl just for you

Happy merry, and such!



Shamelessly stolen from Fuck Yeah Cyanide and Happiness.

Legendary d-bag, Jerry Hollendorfer, still not in the hall of fame

nonetheless, this jackass should be in the hall

To say Jerry Hollendorfer is a fierce competitor is to employ a euphemism suited for respectable print publications and has no place here. He's an enormous asshole. Of course he's competitive, like most that attain his level of success in any endeavor. Often, in sports or business or what have you, the rules of polite discourse require one to refer to highly successful people that discard accepted behavioral norms as they scratch and claw to the top as "fierce competitors". They're really assholes. Jerry Hollendorfer is no different, he's just perfected being an asshole.

He'd fuck over his own grandmother and sell tickets to it if it lopped another win into his column. While at another track when he had the favorite in a graded stakes race, he has been known to call norcal to rip into anyone he felt was responsible for the maiden 8 he just lost by a nose with, and barring that, he'll have his tantrum for anyone that will listen. Whether the genisis of his motivation is classic small man's syndrome, or that his mother never hugged him, I know not. But make no mistake, he wants to win.

Even though he is completely classless, He's made himself a world class trainer through hard work. He didn't grow up in a racing family and never had a barn turned over to him. He drove a truck to pay the bills when training didn't cover the feed bill. He did it with hard work and an insatiable drive to win. Not to make money or be popular, mind you. No. To win.

Recently this asshole called Portland Meadows--YES PORTLAND FUCKING MEADOWS--while in socal saddling a stakes horse to listen to the call of his $2500 maiden running for peanuts. I believe he finished 3rd and called the jockey's mother a whore.

You know his stats: he's chipping away at 6,000 wins, won the Kentucky Oaks acoupla times, a shitload of graded stakes including two million dollar races last year alone, trained Hysterical Lady, Heatseeker, Chocolate Candy (finished 4th in the Derby this year), and.....whatevs, I wrote about it last year.

The point is, sure, he's a d-bag of biblical proportions (probably even uses some leeching horse betting system), but this motherfucker should still be in the horse racing hall of fame, and the fact that he isn't is just further proof that the turf writers that vote are even more stupid than he is an asshole.

Best soy latte I ever had maintenence post

Medley from Riki Lindhome on Vimeo.

I love these ladies. If you dig on this, be sure to get a beed on their hit song Pregnant Women are Smug.

Photographic reminiscing of racing's history in Cuba

Cuba is in the news as the United States makes overtures toward normalization. Before the revolution Cuba was quite the adult playground, complete with a pretty good horse racing operation, I'm told.

Golden Gate Fields packs grandstand for Sunday card

wiener dogs and ostriches and dwarves game's savior?

Fans came out in droves Sunday April 5th for the 9 race card a Golden Gate. 11,462 in paid attendance availed themselves to the popular dollar day promotion, which constituted the biggest on hand crowd since at least 1995 when 11,087 fans took in the presidents day program. No attendance surpassing Sundays mark was released by the track, although it is likely larger crowds had flocked to the east bay track in the pre-simulcast era. "I've been here since 1980" said second leading trainer at the current meet Steve Sherman, "and I can't recall a single day when it was this packed." Trainer Steve Miyadi, when asked the last time he had seen so many people ontrack responded with his trademarked brassiness: "Santa Anita".

Considerably more than this stated ~11k were on hand, however, as kids are admitted free and the track also experienced a marked increase in attendance of non-paying horsemen and their guests.

The weather couldn't have been better and a freshly conceived promotion also attracted much new blood. The Dachshund Derby, a race for qualifying wiener dogs, seemed to be a much bigger draw than the horses. While my hat is off to the marketing department for putting it together with such unprecedented success, I was initially embarrassed at the prospect of people's canine pets racing to an unfurled toilet paper roll finish line is a greater draw than the actual equine athletes competing for purse money well in excess of a hundred grand.

That was when i noticed the Hawthorne Park feed on the monitors. Weiner dog racing didn't seem so farcical any longer as i watched jockeys in Chicago mount ostriches and spring from the starting gate in a racing spectacle worthy of PT Barnum. The cheers heard via simulcast seemed much louder during the ostrich races than they did during the actual horse races.

I still found this disheartening that fans would have far more appreciation for such silliness than the grandness of the game in itself. Solving the puzzle of a race through analytical handicapping is not so enticing nor is the pageantry of this sport of kings nor the powerful athletic performances nor the split second jockey descions made on the back of an animal traveling at 40mph. I understand horse racing has a much steeper learning curve than most other sports, and learning to decipher the hieroglyphics in a racing form is a daunting task for many neophytes of the game. Nonetheless, I felt humanity had slipped yet another notch toward complete Paris Hiltonization.

Then I remembered another sport facing declining attendance and nearing obscurity. Baseball. Yes, the great American pastime itself stared down a similar fate after World War II when changing preferences marginalized the sport in much of the country. Even in the great baseball town of St. Louis, things were so bad, Browns owner Bill Veeck (and later Suffolk Downs frontman) resorted to legendary promotions intended to put butts in seats when the sporting product did not.

The most famous of these was adding a dwarf to the teams roster who was summarily walked on four straight pitches to the delight of the St. Louis fans. Veeck's coup caused an immediate rule change requiring commissioner approval of new contracts, so to preserve the integrity of the game.

He was giving the fans what the wanted, and racing should not be ashamed to do the same. Baseball is a top tier sport now. When Veeck sent 3'7" Eddie Gaedel to the plate in 1951, horse racing was America's most popular sport by far, and boxing was a solid second. If a few wiener dogs and ostrich races help foment a resurgence in our great game, we should all set our snooty purity ideals aside and give the fans what the want.

Trainer Dean Pederson - not as cuddly as he looks, not as mean as he seems

Dean Pederson has been training horses in California for an eon it seems, but still has a cherub face in compare to the bulk of his colleagues. I believe this is because he never smiles. He is the quintessential ornery trainer right out of central casting. He can hurl a fastball of an insult that knocks you to the dirt before you realize it had even been thrown, or sneak one inside with such sly cutting wit that it doesn't catch you until you're half a shedrow away.

Pederson grew up in southern California, the son of a jockey, and has worked on the backstretch his entire life. Before taking out his trainers license, he groomed for Greg Gilchrist and Terry Knight in northern California. As a young groom working for Gilchrist, he tended to 1981 Del Mar Derby winner Juan Barrera. A mention of this is the closest you'll see him to appearing wistful in the company of horsemen--when his kids swing by the barn is another matter.

This evidence that he's a family man away from the track is a tiny window into a damn big heart he'd never fess up to. Still, it pokes through at times. A jockeys agent once turned down the mount on another horse to ride for Mr. Pederson, having given him the call. The other horse was trained by, as an anonymous commenter once noted, "a huge asshole known for brutal vindictiveness" when it comes to jockeys agents. Naturally, the other trainer banned the agent's riders from his barn. Pederson, with a significantly smaller barn, picked up much of the slack with several live mounts, helping two people make rent that might not have otherwise.

Recently, I personally witnessed another such exhibition of class which doesn't jive with his surly trackside disposition. In the 2nd race last Thursday, a 40k starter allowance route, Pederson ran his filly Clouds of Glory. His filly was clearly fouled, the eventual winner coming out in the lane nearing the wire, costing him and his owners the win. While such assertions are often born of the bitterness of a lost wager, this blogger did not bet the race. Furthermore, I would encourage you to view the head-on via CalRacing.com [3:05 mark, free, subscription required].

When the announcement came that the stewards had made no change to the order of finish, I was livid. I actually left the track in disgust shortly thereafter. Conversely, Pederson did not pout or even offer one of a satchel of olympic grade insults he always has at the ready. No, he congratulated the winning trainer--which is standard operating procedure. But, there's a difference between begrudgingly doing so and the authentic I'm happy for you even if I got fucked squarely in the ass that was closer to Pederson offering (sans profanity), and the begrudging variety is also standard operating procedure. Then, as if caught being cordial, in a stern tone he offered this gem of an admonition: "Now, you take your family out for a fancy dinner tonight. That was a better than a twenty grand pot. I don't want to hear that your wife was slaving over the stove."

Santa Anita right now

Owners are still nervous about money in their horseman's account and most are pulling everything out. Some even commented that they feared the might have been a pad lock on the track this morning due to Magna's financial problems. Local media has certainly fueled this idea. News this morning that TOC has taken over the accounts has not calmed fears at Clocker's Corner this morning.

Kentucky Derby Notes

But this is just a sideshow while most of the racing fan world is busy jumping on and off Derby contender bandwagons. A review of Kentucky Derby odds shows Sham Stakes winner Pamplemousse gaining traction. Quality Road, impressive winner of the Fountain of Youth [edit: and now the Florida Derby] has quite a following as well.

In Northern California, the Jerry Hollendorfer trained Chocolate Candy represents our best chance at a derby starter. Having a hometown horse to root for really adds something to me. While the California Derby and the El Camino Real are not known as the most important preps, they have had their impact. Charismatic, winner of the 1999 Derby finished 2nd in the El Camino. Tabasco Cat went on to take the Kentucky Derby after winning the El Camino as well. He hasn't shown himself to be in the league with the top contenders, but There's plenty of time to prove himself.

Non racing related maintenance post

I love Ida Maria lately and just can't stop watching this video.

damn! embedding has been disabled since i posted this. click the vid a second time and it'll play directly from youtube.

Ida Maria - Rock The Deuce - MTV Shows - Ida Maria - - MTV Shows

Scooped by Paulick

Rumors have been circulating since the Madoff scandal emerged that former CHRB Chair Richard Shapiro was one of the casualties. After a wee bit of digging and a few phone calls, I'd put some of the picture together. Finally today I was able to get the client list, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Scoop? No such luck. Ray Paulick reported everything I had and a good bit more yesterday. Fucking professionals.

Valparaiso Sporting Club teaser post

More to come. In the meantime, enjoy the grandstand and the green green turf course.

Club Hipico on Raceday

I know I promised pics of Valparaiso Sporting Club, and billed it as the second coming. First, enjoy these photos from a day's races at Club Hipico de Santiago, which is a spectacular track in its own right.



above: view of the grandstand from the back. this is what you see when you first walk it. it is the same pic I posted before, but NOW WITH FOUNTAINS!





above: stretch drive





above: returning to the paddock post race

Apology issued

In a previous post I drew some hard and fast conclusions which I now see were in error. My regular reader (there are unsubstaintiated rumors I may have two now) might recall the post I declared heralded American racetracks like Del Mar and Saratoga shitboxes in compare to Club Hipico de Santiago. That remians an accurate assessment, however to imply Club Hipico is the Boss before seeing Valparaiso Sporting Club in Viña del Mar was wholly unfair. This racetrack is FULL OF WIN and deserves its own post. Perhaps a series of them. I´m confident you´ll excuse my orgasmically banal verbiage once I get some pics posted. ´till then.....

Hipodromo Chile

Accross town from the lavish Club Hipico de Santiago is the modern and modest Hipodromo Chile. The racing is just as good, and the atmosphere perhaps even more festive. Race goers in suits and sundresses were of a decidedly lower percentage at Hipodromo than at Club Hipico, but there was certainly more booze consumed per capita at Hipodromo. If Hipico was keeneland, then Hipodromo would be Turfway, only with just as many graded stakes as their otherwise dominant sibling.

One other notable difference is Hipodromo has a dirt track--the only one in the nation, I´m told, and no turf course.

I´ll post some pics for your viewing pleasure shortly. [EDIT: my pics are now included! Click on the images to see them uncropped, as Blogger reformats them given the posting method i´ve employed here. Posting from the southern half of the globe is just trouble enough to induce me to comprimise my already lax standards.]

Club Hipico, Santiago, Chile

Perhaps you are familiar with Del Mar, Keeneland, Santa Anita, and Saratoga? Shitboxes, each of them. At least in compare to the grand lady in the southwest corner of Santiago, Chile.

Meet my new love, Club Hipico de Santiago.

With unapologetic colonial grandeur and bulwarked by the Andes, Club Hipico anchors a delightful neighborhood. It's occupied by endless sheets of sun gracing work-a-day clock punchers hustling forth and from, and moneyed elites being seen, to indie cafe denizens camped in one of many quaint caffeine casas lining the calles that spoke from the track.

There's no parking lot here. Still, the grandstand teems on weekends with Chileans eager for good sport and an ambient sense of jubilee, as much as a winning punt. And why not? Don't you want to sit in this GRANDstand?

TBA photo contest

You should check out the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance photo contest entires. Vote for your favs.

Google hosts treasure trove of horse racing photos from Life Magazine

On New Year's Eve I took in the racing action at San Isidro, just outside of Buenos Aires. I was profitable at the windows, but less than successful at snapping a quality pic. Thank god Google over 20% of Life's image archive is now hosted with plans to have the remainder up this year. Luckily, there were some solid Argentine racing pics to poach.