<%=siteName%>

In a matter of just a few days, horseracing in Ontario seems to have plunged itself into an ice age. Fort Erie Racetrack appears to be dead; at least the priest is chanting the last rights and the patient’s hand is lifeless.

And on Christmas Eve, a couple of e-mails within less than three hours of each other spelt out a hostile relationship between the Ontario Harness Horse Association (OHHA) and Woodbine Entertainment Group (WEG).

The two parties have a contract that expires at the end of 2008. This deal expresses the condition under which harness racing is conducted at Woodbine.  WEG offers some of the largest purses anywhere for standardbred racing – over $300,000 was raced for on Boxing Day – but there is now a deepening rift that concerns more than just cash.

In a press release issued just after noon on Christmas Eve, OHHA revealed that,

“The OHHA members then voted to not enter horses to race at Woodbine, starting with the January 1, 2009 card, and continuing until a contract acceptable to them is signed by OHHA.”

There seems to be three difficult points between the two parties. The harness people don’t like the idea that thoroughbred horsemen decide the amount of revenue from winter thoroughbred simulcasts. OHHA is also unhappy with WEG’s apparent demand that the harness side “give up its right to represent or intervene with the Ontario Racing Commission when a racing participant…has been  banned from racing …by WEG management.”

And the third bone of contention is racing dates. Woodbine wants to cut out Sunday afternoon racing. OHHA does not.

A couple hours after the OHHA release, Woodbine generated their own response. Addressing the issue of revenue from the simulcasts, WEG stated,

“WEG is not proposing any change to the sharing of wagering revenue from the previous contract. In 2009, purses are expected to grow by $4 million and will exceed $80 million.”

The most expressive paragraph in the WEG release concerns their right, as a private property, to ban any individual and, according to WEG, this is all about the perception that horseracing is honest.

“Our customers are telling us that they have some serious concerns regarding the integrity of our harness racing, and this has contributed to a decrease in wagering of approximately 20% over the last five years,” argues WEG.

Howver However, WEG does seem to indicate that any trespass warrant or banning of a horse person is not inflexible and that OHHA would still have options at its disposal.

“In the event WEG exercises its private property rights to exclude an individual, generally as a result of a serious performance enhancing drug violation, and OHHA wishes to reverse the exclusion, WEG is proposing a binding dispute resolution mechanism within the contract,” says the release. “The agreement would not preclude an individual from seeking relief from the ORC or the courts.”

As for the racing dates, WEG feels that Sundays seem to attract the lowest amount of betting.

“…the number of race dates will be based on the ability to fill programs with quality racing that will generate wagering pools of at least $ million,” its release says, suggesting that Sundays don’t thrill as much as other days.

In the two letters, I seemed to have found at least one incompatible set of circumstances (aside from the OHHA people and WEG people in the same room).

The OHHA letter states,

“Without the agreement of horsemen who provide live racing at the tracks the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency can not issue a betting permit allowing betting on horse races.”

But Woodbine says,

“WEG intends to offer live racing despite the call by OHHA to boycott the entry box. WEG will conduct racing for every scheduled card even if field size is small.”

And this is where the whole thing could really get unpleasant. Are there harness drivers and trainers out there who are not members of OHHA? Would they be lured to Woodbine for purses they don’t normally race for? Would dissenting members of OHHA – those opposed to the boycott – show up to race?  How many horsemen does Woodbine  need to provide sufficient agreement that satisfies the Canadian Pari-Mutuel Agency?

Would racing at Woodbine become like the time the NFL played games with minor leaguers and walk-ons after the union went on strike? Would there be a response from committed OHHA members?

Suddenly a cold January has become a cold, dark, angry January.

I generally visit the Woodbine (www.woodbineentertainment.com) web site on a daily basis sometimes out of my ongoing personal interest in all things horse racing, but also to find stuff to steal for my paper Down The Stretch. I found a recent blog from Jeff Bratt about how the voting for the Sovereign Awards ( national Horse Racing honours) occurs before the end of the racing season. I thought he made a very strong argument to change the voting, so that it occurs when all the racing is done. One point in particular - when voting was completed, Patrick Husbands and Jim McCaleney were tied in the jockeys’ race. Husbands ended up winning and he was also voted the Country’s outstanding jockey, but what if Jimmy Mac had won a dozen more races in the final week?  All that would do is create unecessary controversy and make the voting process look dumb.

As it turned out, McAleney might have voted away his last chance when he agreed that racing couldn’t go on the last day of racing at Woodbine. After two races, the jockeys said it was just too cold to guarentee safety out there. Also on the Woodbine site is a blog from Renee Kierans, who is actually my favourite racing announcer, even if I don’t agree with her latest submission that the jockeys were wrong to call off racing.

What the jockeys told me - and I ran it by Eurico Rosa da Silva, Patrick Husbands and Jim McAleney - is that their hands froze and they couldn’t feel their reins. Da Silva told me, that in the second race, he could clearly see that the jockey in front of him was having great difficulty controlling his horse.

 Under the most benign conditions, riding a thoroughbred is a dangerous proposition. If a jockey says he can’t  grasp the reins, or throw a cross, or operate the whip properly, shouldn’t that be critical information? If the wind is blowing so hard, it pushes the animals out of their paths, isn’t that something to consider?

  Have to respect Renee’s point of view. She’s a rider herself. One of the best broadcasting moments of the year is when she rides out and, from her saddle, interviews the winner of the Queen’s Plate during the run out past the wire. But her angle that the jockeys should have considered the trainers, owners and stables that needed one more win to help the bottom line doesn’t work for me. To go out and do something of unreasonable danger for the purpose of generating cash is a unpleasant equation.  If any horse or jockey had been injured because of the cold, because the horses could not be controlled, there would have been all kinds of unpleasant consequences.

Let the bettors gamble with their money, not the jockeys with their lives.

On a much more uplifting note, the 14th issue of Down The Stretch (www.downthestretchnewspaper.com) will be printed tomorrow and distributed at Woodbine and in several Toronto area Champions lounges.

And this issue is wonderful, if you’ll excuse the bragging. My layouy guy, Gord, informed me that the download to our printers, York Region Printers, is 17 times larger than any previous one. Not sure how that could be, but it’s because we have way more pictures than ever in this one.  Our four page spread - The Top 50 Racing Stories of 2008 is the most exciting feature we’ve ever published. We have two pages of Soveriegn Award coverage and page 23 is something you will not see in any other publication, a rendition of How the Harness Horsemen Saved Christmas.

It’s page after page of neat stuff, brilliant layout and colourful images. Our cartoon page is funny and unique and writer Keith McCalmont has a terrific story on a guy in New York who serenades racing fans with hilarious songs. By the way, Keith has his own fantastic site Tripledeadheat.com, which I think is the best of the genre. Keith has a real fan’s take on horse racing and knows how to express it. I also like the way he downloads pictures and videos to illustrate his stories.

I’d like to do the same here, but I don’t know if this blog has that same capacity.

I’m several years older than Keith, and unlike individuals of his generation, I wasn’t born with the computer capacitator chip in my brain. 

So for the next issue of Down The Stretch (www.downthstretchnewspaper.com) we’re compiling a list of the Top 50 Horseracing Stories for 2008 and boy has this got the contributors to the paper at each other’s throats.  To start with, there was a lot of interesting stuff that happened at racetracks this year.

Where do you put Big Brown? Was his sensational win in the Kentucky Derby a bigger story than his bizarre last place finish in the Belmont? Does Not Bourbon winning the Queen’s Plate trump Ginger Brew in the Canadian Oaks? How many Somebeachsomewhere conquests should be used? Where do you put all the harness driver accomplishments, like Jody Jamieson and Mark MacDonald both winning their 4000th in the same year? Would you put Chantal Sutherland riding five winners in one day ahead of Emile Ramsammy winning three races in three days on the Victoria Day Weekend?

Where do the Breeders’ Cup results go? Do the second place finishes of Canadian horses Sealy Hill and Fatal Bullet get placed ahead of the fact that European Horses won five races on the main card? Was Sandy Hawley winning the Living Legends race at 59 the biggest thrill of the year? How about Marlang, winning the Breeders’ Stakes in August then taking a Stakes at Saratoga four weeks later? Is it more significant that Mark Casse trained his 1000th winner or that Luc Ouellette drove into the winners circle for the 8000th time.

A mare called Peppers Pride set a record by winning her first 19 races. An 18 year-old harness driver won over $1,000,000. Harlem Rocker ran a mile as fast as Big Brown. Patrick Husbands won on each of the final 18 days of racing at Woodbine for an amazing come-from-behind win in the jockeys race. Serge Savard’s Shadow Play hurt himself while winning his first heat in the Little Brown Jug, but came back to take the final.

And what do you do with steroid shooting, lip flapping trainer Richard Dutrow?

Where would you put that guy. I’m sure there’s a lot of good ideas.

For the answers to all of the above, get youself a copy of the next Down The Stretch, coming to a Woodbine Racetrack near you in the middle of next week. 

The news out of Fort Erie is very bad. Nordic Gaming, the well-heeled company that has been running the racetrack there announced yesterday that there will not be racing at the border oval for 2009.  The track has lost on average about $4 million a year in each of the last four years and it appears Nordic has little interest in losing several million more.

As part of yesterday’s announcement, 190 employees were advised that they would be terminated as of March 31, 2009.

There is a very slender thread of hope. Nordic has applied to the Ontario Racing Commission for racing dates in 2009, but that’s more of a formality. The provincial government is unlikely to extend to horse racing the kind of bailout the car industry is counting on.

The problems of the fort are multi-fold. The introduction of the slots several years ago was a nice boost to the cash flow, but in recent years, the slots have bee  underperforming; the fact that smoking has been banned in Ontario casinos has contributed to that, so has the Casino on the American side. The weakened Canadian dollar and the present state of the world’s economy is no help either.

 In this age of satellite wagering,  Fort Erie’s buffet of mostly low-claiming races is not especially appealing to the bettors.

For the past couple of years, the Fort has elected not to race on saturdays, preferring the Monday and Tuesday slots when many of the larger tracks aren’t in action.

Today on the Fort Erie web site, we are advised that “The 2009 live racing schedule will be available when the 2009 season is finalized.”

Today, the word ‘finalized’ takes on a different meaning for Fort Erie racetrack which has been in operation for 116 years.  

I guess there’s no real humble way to put this. I was up for two Jockey Club of Canada Sovereign Awards Friday night and I lost one, won one. I got the “Award of Merit for Feature Story” for a piece called How Many Horses Can One Man Save, which ran in the August 8 issue of Down The Stretch.  I had a pretty good idea I was on to something good when Alex Brown called me last summer. This is a man who has dedicated himself to stopping the horse slaughter industry in Canada.  Thousands of horses, many of them thoroughbreds and standardbreds end up on the conveyor belt to the slaughter house when owners simply determine it’s financially inconvenient to keep them. Brown spent a year in Toronto, working as an exercise rider for the Steve Asmussen barn, all the while examining the process that allows forgotten horses to be sold for meat.

Anyway, it was a great moment at the Four Seasons, among all the tuxedoed and gowned horse people to hear my name called.  And I won’t be distributing my thank-you speech. I had some kind of mental blackout and attack of nerves. I could barely say, “Thank-you!” Not very impressive for a guy who works permanently in radio.  Had I not panicked, I might have pointed out that the other two candidates in the my category were, ironically, guys who had helped me with Down The Stretch during the year. Chris Lomon was nominated for a story he wrote for The Game and as part of the Woodbine Communications department, has taken my phone calls and e-mails countless times as I request racing forms, statistics, jockey interviews, facts, figures and betting vouchers. And Perry Lefko, author of many books, including a terrific one one on Sandy Hawley, was nominated for his story/eulogy on Ted Labanowich. Lefko was parked at the Down The Stretch table and has been a valuable source this year with stories, press releases and marketing ideas.  

In the other category I was nominated in - best newspaper article - my name was not called. The winner was Beverley Smith of the Globe and Mail, which was not a surprise…her story on owner Gus Schickedanz was much better than the story I had submitted.

Some of the other awards were interesting. Patrick Husbands won a close vote to win as Jockey of the Year over Jim McAleney who brought his wife Kim, kids Cody and Caitlin and his Dad, Wilf to the fancy party.

Mark Casse scored his third straight Sovereign as leading trainer. Certainly well-deserved, since Casse led all trainers at Woodbine, but as Woodbine CEO  David Willmot noted about the runner-up Roger Attfield, ” There are four races at Woodbine worth $Million or more and he won one and finished second in the other three.”

DannyDion has been in the horse business just six years, but he’s vaulted to the top in a hurry. Dion cashed four Sovereigns Friday night…for Four year-old Female Horse of the Year - Bear Now, top sprinter - Fatal Bullet, Horse of the Year - Fatal Bullet and  for Outstanding Owner.  The Fatal Bullet night was ripe for controversy. The speedball, who came second in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint, lost to Queen’s Plate Winner Not Bourbon in the Outstanding Three Year-Old Colt category, but won as Horse of the Year, a category that didn’t include Not Bourbon. Go figure…

What made the evening great for me was that I had an entire table populated with Down The Stretch people. Mila and Tony Kalloo, my dear friends who have bankrolled Down The Stretch were almost as thrilled as I was. My associate editor Eleanor LeBlanc looked gorgeous in a sleek blue dress. Art Director Gord Steventon looked like something out of a James Bond film in his tux  and writer Keith McCalmont was busy collecting pictures and interviews for his excellent blog Triple Dead Heat. And, of course, Lefko gave a tongue-in-cheek play by play of the entire evening’s events.

I should also mention one of the neatest moments of the night was when 16 year-old Matt Waples won for Best Photograph. Matt is the youngest son of legendary harness driver Ron Waples who has also sired Randy Waples, a leading driver on the Woodbine cicrcuit. Matt is the youngest person to ever win a Sovereign. I missed the record by a mere 42 years.

You might want to look out for the next issue of Down The Stretch ( www.downthestretchnewspaper.com). We’re going to count down the Top 50 Horseracing Stories of 2008. Considering the pitched battles between myself and other contributors over what should be included, this list will, at least, be controversial.