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. 

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.