It appears that Frank Stronach, head of the Maryland Jockey Club’s parent Magna Entertainment, is fairly certain that the citizens of Maryland will approve slots for the state’s racetracks in a November referendum. He has stopped leveraging the Preakness, a revered part of the state’s identity. You have to wonder, though, what difference slot machines can possibly make in a state surrounded by casinos in Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Atlantic City. Maryland may have missed the boat on this one.
Frank’s energy drink was readily available at Pimlico last weekend. Oh, man. It may be impossible suck more. The term drink would suggest the possibility that this stuff is palatable. Not.
You learn something about a state in its hotel bars. For instance: The Maryland lottery’s version of video crack is an animated horse racing game. A large part of the Maryland countryside is home to a native horse-breeding and training community and racing is part of the very fabric of life in a state where the future of racing is, at best, uncertain and, perhaps more realistically, doomed. Something wrong with that pictur? Strange that the lottery would chose racing as the theme for its version of video robbery. Stranger: the races are set at Australian tracks.
Stronach is advertising a racing partnership involving the horses bred at his Adena Springs operations. Whatever chaos he has brought to the racing business, there is no denying the remarkable success Stronach has enjoyed as a breeder and owner. In this sense, he is a throwback – one of the few large breeders who races the horses he breeds. If more people were doing this, the PETA people might not have been standing on a corner in a bad neighborhood outside Pimlico on Saturday. (By the way. They brought children. To that neighborhood? Reckless endangerment?)
The death of Eight Belles after the Kentucky Derby has raised questions in many areas including one concerning the prevalence of Native Dancer in the overwhelming majority of American pedigrees. Another question: Where is it possible to find a stallion or mare absent the influence of that ancestry? Big Brown himself is inbred 3x3 to Northern Dancer, whose maternal grandsire is Native Dancer. He, then, is 4x4 to the source of all this brittleness and probably another accident waiting to happen. --PM
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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For a complete outcross of Native Dancer/Raise a Native/Northern Dancer look at Seattle Fitz. His first crop are two year olds and have generated staggering ROI's at the 2 year olds in training sales, leading to a full book of 100 for this year. Imagine that, an outcross that throws a real race horse!
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