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June 2008 - Posts
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In hockey — a sport that I know fairly well, having played it since I was seven years old — there’s a tradition called the playoff beard.
When a team enters the Stanley Cup playoffs, members of the team, individually or as a group, pledge...
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Rick Dutrow, trainer of the best three year-old in America, has been notified that he’ll be suspended for 15 days by the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority for a drug offense.
Again.
Dutrow has a rap sheet that includes more than 30 pages of violations...
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Two high-profile horsemen are in the news today for newly minted suspensions they’ve received.
Horse racing’s penalty box is unfortunately filling up.
Rick Dutrow, trainer of Big Brown, faces a 15 day suspension in Kentucky after his horse...
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T.S. Eliot wrote that the “greatest treason [is] to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Racing, in its stop-and-start initiative to control drugs, will likely be forced to do the right thing for the right reason — the health and...
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For a time after September 11, 2001, as if by universal agreement, sports commentators and even athletes steered away from the old standby of comparing sports to war, the sacrifice of athletes to that of soldiers.
Harry Aleo, the crusty Northern California...
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Wednesday, as the escalator bore me down to the paddock at Monmouth, an email buzzed my Iphone: “Congratulations, Erin and Frank!” it began.
A scan brought good news: our filly The Big Four Oh is pregnant.
Names are already chosen, male and...
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In a week with plenty going on — Congressional hearings, major races (including the Queen’s Plate and Colonial Turf Cup), and the possibility that anti-drug horsemen Larry Jones and Jim Squires may have been framed in a recent drug positive...
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You knew the fix was in for yesterday’s hearings on Capitol Hill regarding horse racing as soon as the title of the hearing was released: “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred...
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It’s the oldest game in the world: blaming somebody else.
In horse racing, it has a long and honored history.
Trainers think that all jocks are pinheads and that most lost races are the result of the pinheads’ propensity to make bad decisions...
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With Congress breathing down its neck, the racing industry, in the form of Racing Commissioners International, has gathered and released statistics on deaths among rachorses (including thoroughbreds, standardbreds, and quarter horses).
How you interpret...
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A lot of recent talk out in the blogosphere about how the NTRA should have aggressively marketed Curlin’s return to the US in yesterday’s Stephen Foster (here’s our friend Dana on the topic).
I disagree.
Well, truthfully, I halfway agree...
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A subcommittee of the US House of Representatives has set June 19 as the date for a hearing titled, “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Racing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse.”
Not that the game is rigged...
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“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
So wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, and the same can be said of Triple Crown aspirants: all of the 11 successful ones resemble each other, while the near...
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There were several foregone conclusions Belmont day. But the one we’d been promised — that Big Brown would win the Belmont Stakes and secure the first Triple Crown in 30 years — turned out not to be one of them.
It was, however, a foregone...
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In the end, Kent Desormeaux said it best: “I had no horse.”
Big Brown, on the biggest stage, with the long-awaited Triple Crown in the offing, was empty.
And so Desormeaux wrangled him to the outside rail and out of the race, another horse...
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More Posts: Rewind
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