Santa Anita, you had one job!
Posted: November 4, 2019 Filed under: horses, the California Condition Leave a comment
Santa Anita racetrack is a beautiful place. There’s history. Seabiscuit raced there, a statue honors him. It’s good to sit in the stands, look at the mountains, and drink a beer, watch the horses race. Read the little horse newspaper.
Santa Anita’s been having problems though. Horses keep dying there.
Since December 36 (!) horses have died.
On Saturday at Santa Anita they had the Breeders’ Cup, a nationally televised race.
Santa Anita! This is your big moment. All eyes on you. You’re on TV, time to shine.
Please.
Don’t let any horses die.
They had ONE job. And what happened?
A green screen was rushed onto the track to block Mongolian Groom from the view of 67,811 fans and a prime-time television audience. He was loaded onto an equine ambulance and taken to a hospital on the backstretch.
Cup officials said in a statement about two hours after the race that Mongolian Groom had been euthanized after suffering a serious fracture to his left hind leg.
Guys!
Couldn’t we pretend we were giving him tender care? euthanize him later?!
I’ll be sad if Santa Anita closes down. It’s like some enchanted time capsule of southern California. But, if you’re in the horse business, you can’t get me excited about horses and then keep killing them.
Start of the Juvenile Sprint by Jlvsclrk for Wiki
China Racing Club
Posted: June 11, 2018 Filed under: horses 1 Comment
Was wondering why Justify / Mike Smith’s silks looked like the Chinese flag. Turns out the horse is part owned by China Horse Club.
The China Horse Club has about 200 members, according to its vice president, Eden Harrington. Membership costs a minimum of $1 million, according to some reports, but Mr. Harrington said the club offered different tiers of investment and that the fee was a credit that went toward the purchase of horses. He declined to give a range, and the club does not disclose the identities of members, who include wealthy citizens from China’s mainland and beyond.
Hmmm. From this NYT article by Melissa Hoppert and Alexandra Stevenson.
Mr. Harrington said the club kept its membership private to shield members from potential public scrutiny amid a Chinese government led anti-corruption campaign which has “created a culture of fear where people didn’t want to be seen to be spending money in a way that may be seen as excessive.”
Update on Kentucky Derby times
Posted: May 7, 2018 Filed under: horses, sports Leave a comment
The Darley Arabian
Much stimulating discussion ensued after Saturday’s post about why Kentucky Derby winners aren’t getting much faster.
Reader Avin D. sends us this 2014 Deadspin piece by Roger Pielke Jr. which has much better stats and looks at whether we’ve neared peak speeds in animal races:
One possibility, advanced by Denny and others, is that thoroughbred race times may have leveled off because the narrow genetic diversity of racehorses limits the genetic diversity in the pool of potential thoroughbred champions. Modern thoroughbreds are descendants of a small number of horses (less than 30 in the 18th century), and 95 percent are thought to trace their ancestry to a single horse, The Darley Arabian. Today, there are fewer than 25,000 thoroughbreds born each year in the United States. Compare that with the more than 7 billion people worldwide.3 The size of the human population may simply lead to a greater number of potential athletes with extreme speed.
Very cool. Imagine if every current human runner was descended from, like, Guto Nyth Bran.
The Darley Arabian sired Flying Childers:
It is said he completed this race, over the Round Course at Newmarket, in 6 minutes, 40 seconds and that he reached a speed of 82 1/2 feet per second or 1 mile per minute. This was claimed to make Flying Childers the only horse on record as having matched the top speed of the unbeaten Eclipse. By way of comparison, this would be nearly 40 seconds faster than the unbeaten Frankel ran the Newmarket Rowley Mile in his famous 2,000 Guineas victory of 2011, over 30 seconds faster than the current mile track record and very close to the five furlong track record set by Lochsong in 1994.
As for Eclipse:
Eclipse is still remembered in the phrase “Eclipse first and the rest nowhere”, snowcloned as “[name of competitor] first and the rest nowhere,” referring to any dominating victory. This phrase is occasionally seen in American print media (most often in newspaper sport sections) but is more common in Britain.
A new one to me. If Flying Childers could keep his alleged top speed of 82.5 feet per second he’d finish the Kentucky Derby in a minute twenty.
Why aren’t horse races longer anymore, the way they were in the Stewball era?
Anyway, congrats to Justify:
