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Joe Clancy 
Trainer David Donk would never call himself a technology guy and reluctantly accepted an iPad as a gift from his wife Faye a few years ago. He owned a laptop and an iPhone, what did he need with another gadget?
Now, it’s a big part of his job and a fairly constant way to access the facts about his growing stable of horses.
Alice Clapham sat on Messi Thursday morning as the Saratoga allowance winner tried to stuff grass into his mouth like a hay baler. She laughed, guided him – a little – and talked about Messi’s stablemate Miss Temple City.
Or horses in general.
It rains differently in Saratoga. Louder, longer, more vertical, as if it comes from a higher sky. Tuesday, it fell long and steady, a wet soundtrack to a morning that came too soon after a long, late newspaper deadline.
So I listened. And thought.
Marc McLean went to the 2001 Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park, even told some friends from Connecticut to join him. His family’s big horse – well, a big horse his family bred – named Xtra Heat was running in the Sprint.
Gary Contessa’s first summer in Saratoga happened in 1978 with a 12-hours-a-day job as a groom/pony boy/exercise boy/hotwalker/foreman for Jimmy Picou. The barn did not have running hot water, instead relying on a 55-gallon drum propped up on cinder blocks over a flame fueled by a propane tank.
Rick Violette called his Saratoga barn near the 6-furlong gap on the main track “as close to a home as you could have.” He’s been there for, as he put it, 50 years. It’s probably not quite that long, but he did work there for David Whiteley and Angel Penna before becoming a trainer.
You can’t call it a movement yet, or even a groundswell really. No, Racing Gratitude is more like the current flickering in an old neon sign. You know the kind. Zzzpppptttt…Eat at Joe’s…Pttzzzffftt…Rheingold Extra Dry Beer – To Go…Tkkkzzzrrrrmmmtt…Clancy’s Tavern.
They say the little things matter, right? I hope so, because the big things can be pretty heavy to carry around. Work, school, stress, money, life, time, age . . . you know the stuff. I’ve been in Saratoga about 10 days, and a handful of little things are way up on my list of highlights (including a hilarious trip to see Minions Tuesday night). A whole lot of big things are at the other end of the list.
The security guard tells the guy driving the dark blue Chevy Tahoe with the North Carolina plates and the trailer hitch to move, then move again. Finally, with the truck parked by a Dumpster in a spot formerly occupied by a golf cart, Rae Fernandez hops out with a shavings fork a newly purchased blue tarp.
Long before she talked to trainers and jockeys after big wins, way before she interviewed football and basketball coaches on the sidelines, far back to when she was just a high-schooler in North Jersey, Jeannine Edwards went to Belmont Park to look for a job.
With her mother.
