June 7, 2008

"I had no horse."

Said Big Brown's jockey. "'He was empty. He didn't have anything left."
Instead of Big Brown becoming the 12th Triple Crown winner and first in 30 years, he was the first of 19 horses going for a Triple to finish last.
The winner of the Belmont was 38-1 long shot Da' Tara. I like that.

10 comments:

Cedarford said...

Instead of becoming "Big Brown Triple Crown winner", the nag ran today like "Big Brown Turd".

ricpic said...

I'm surprised that Desormeaux eased off on BB before the race was over. You'd think he'd have given him the whip. Fears about that quarter crack?

rhhardin said...

Ohne Huf, kein Pferd

LutherM said...

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,...but time and chance happeneth to them all."
Ecclesiastes 9:11
“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”
Damon Runyon quote

Matt Brown said...

I was rooting for Big Brown, for the extremely obvious reason.

Bender R said...

If you are basically going to say "no mas" and TOTALLY QUIT because it is clear that you are not going to win and you have fears about the cracked hoof, you should have never raced the horse in the first place.

AllenS said...

Never bet on the horses.

ballyfager said...

You could have whipped the horse from here to Pittsburgh and it wouldn't have accomplished anything. You see, the people in the game really do care about the horses. Why whip this horse when the jock already knew he had nothing today?

Lutherm,

That's my second favorite Runyon quote. My favorite is this;

"All of life is 6-5 against" Those of you not familiar with gambling terms may not know what that means but, believe me, you've lived it.

former law student said...

The easiest way to cause a horse to run out of gas on race day is to work him too hard too close to race day. No forensic test will show any tampering.

I would never have expected that to happen here, had I not read this NYT oped, which makes both Big Brown's owner and his trainer seem sketchy:

Rooting for the firm [International Equine Acquisitions Holdings, which owns Big Brown] and its co-president and public face, Michael Iavarone (who was fined and suspended in 1999 by the National Association of Securities Dealers for unauthorized trades and who was ordered to pay a judgment in 2003 for not paying for horses he bought at auction), would be validating a “win at any price” mentality.

Which brings us to the bigger problem. Equine Acquisitions’ former trainer, Greg Martin, had his license revoked in 2005 for using an illegal performance-enhancing drug on a company horse. Its current trainer, Richard Dutrow, is even more notorious for pushing the envelope. He has a list of violations longer than most anyone else’s in the history of the sport.

No one has seriously accused him of doing anything untoward with Big Brown, but he’s been fined or suspended for doping in each of the last eight years, including two instances in January. The Association of Racing Commissioners International report on Dutrow reveals 72 offenses since 1979, 13 of them related to drugs.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/opinion/07fornatale.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

ballyfager said...

Look folks, it's a horse race. Anything can happen in a horse race. Don't look for plots or conspiracies. The horse has the last word and the horse just didn't feel like it yesterday.

It's very hot and humid in New York now. Maybe the horse didn't like that. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it either.

Nobody knows and probably nobody will ever know. A horse race is a very iffy thing. So if you need to take a lesson away from this it would be - no horse who ever lived is a good bet at odds of 1-5.