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Joe Clancy Mack Robinson, Jackie’s brother, didn’t use his silver medal from the 1936 Summer Olympics to meet people. He wore his Olympic team jacket to the only job he could get, as a street sweeper. White residents of Pasadena, Cal., called the cops on Robinson and made him take off the jacket.
When Tom’s d’Etat crossed the finish line in the Stephen Foster last week, jockey Miguel Mena stood up in the irons and brought his finger to his lips in the universal signal to “Shhhh.” There were no fans in attendance at Churchill Downs, but Mena was speaking for his horse who silenced everybody with the Grade 2 stakes win.
“Am I right? Am I wrong?”
That’s all Mikey Mitchell had in his mind as six horses split early in the Virginia Gold Cup at Great Meadow Racecourse June 27. After five fences, leader Storm Team and stalker Andi’amu went wide and aimed at a timber fence on the outer loop. Codrington College, Doc Cebu, Lemony Bay and Super Saver clung to the pylons and went left for the inner loop. For a moment, Mitchell aboard Doc Cebu wondered.
When the voice on the other end of the phone belongs to Jerry D. Bailey and in answering a question about a horse he rode 36 years ago he mentions the horse in the same sentence as Cigar, it instantly becomes an E.F. Hutton moment.
When Jerry Bailey talks Cigar, people listen.
The inquiry concerned Fit To Fight, winner of the New York Handicap Triple Crown in 1984, the fourth and most likely last horse to accomplish that feat.
Michael McCarthy is thinking about traveling from his Del Mar base to Keeneland when Rushie makes an expected start in next Saturday’s Grade 2 Toyota Blue Grass Stakes.
“I feel OK about it, but it’s going to be a game-day decision,” McCarthy said. “You know why I feel OK about it? Because I’ve already had this stuff.”
Yeah, McCarthy has counted the days since coming down with Covid-19.
In 2020, everything is different. If you start there, with those five simple words, then you’ll be able to handle all the change this year has brought. Or at least process the effects of it. The global health and economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic has hit every aspect of life and Thoroughbred racing is no different.
Hang around horse racing long enough and you will hear old-timers say, after some inspirational on-track performance or another, “They don’t make horses like that anymore.” The statement is a cliché, hyperbole, exaggeration and wrong – nobody really “makes” horses. They’re born. Nature is in charge, not man.
It was early evening on Memorial Day in 1982 and Dr. J. David Richardson had just returned home from Churchill Downs, where, in pre-simulcasting days, he had to go into the racing office to watch the Met Mile from Belmont Park on a small, black-and-white TV. Conquistador Cielo ran off the screen, romping to a 7 ¼-length win while setting a track record of 1:33.
In 1984, my dad sent me (and a van driver) to run a weird, gawky horse named Family at Laurel Park while my dad went somewhere else to run a different (probably less weird and gawky) horse. Dad said he’d get somebody to saddle Family, since back then you needed an assistant trainer’s or trainer’s license to tack up a runner in the paddock. No problem. The van driver drove, I did the rest – including my first application of rundown bandages for a race. In the paddock with Family, I looked for our would-be saddler and saw no one I knew. There was a valet, me, the van driver, the horse and an annoyed paddock judge.
At some point, Terry Finley said it out loud.
“If I had the ability to just push the calendar forward so we could wake up on January 1, 2021, I might do it.”
