It’s been a difficult Derby prep season so far, thanks to the weather gods; rain postponed racing in California, snow did the job in the Northeast, and finally Arkansas also fell victim to their wrath.  The Southwest Stakes, scheduled for Presidents’ Day, will now be run next Saturday; whether the same field [...]]]>

Not the horse

It’s been a difficult Derby prep season so far, thanks to the weather gods; rain postponed racing in California, snow did the job in the Northeast, and finally Arkansas also fell victim to their wrath.  The Southwest Stakes, scheduled for Presidents’ Day, will now be run next Saturday; whether the same field turns up will be determined later in the week when the race is redrawn.  Of particular note were the top three finishers from the San Rafael: Conveyance, Cardiff Giant and Domonation [sic – but he's by Maria's Mon, it all makes sense].  While a chief objective for most will be getting a chance to see how these horses perform on traditional dirt, I am intrigued simply because Cardiff Giant is running.

And no, it’s not because I used to live in Wales – the Cardiff in question in this case is in upstate New York – it’s because I have an unhealthy interest in the history of scientific hoaxes.  Let’s rewind to the 1860s: Gorillas had only been ‘discovered‘ (by white European men, that is) in the late 1840s; Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, and the hunt was on for ‘missing links.’  In the Pacific Northwest, reports of something not unlike Bigfoot appeared in local newspapers during this same period – in short, it was an ideal time for someone to mix these ingredients together into a moneymaking soufleé.

Enter George Hull: after arguing with a fundamentalist minister over the literal truth of a particularly obscure Bible passage (Genesis 6:4 – ‘There were giants in the earth in those days’), he decided that not only could this notion be amusing to parody, but that it might just be a nice little earner.  He set about hiring stonecutters to carve a ten-foot ‘giant’ and had the resulting sculpture shipped to his cousin’s farm, where it was subsequently buried.  After letting the giant ‘age’ for nearly a year, Hull’s cousin, William Newell, hired some local men to ‘dig a well‘ – and lo, they uncovered a giant ‘petrified man.’  Immediately, crowds poured in to see this marvel – first for 25 cents a head, then double that.

While scientists immediately pronounced the Cardiff Giant a fake, a number of the fundamentalist preachers Hull had originally set out to poke fun at defended it as legitimate – and the public did not seem to care either way, and kept coming. Hull sold his share of the Giant for $37,500 – not a bad return on a $2,600 investment, especially in 1869 – to a group of businessmen who moved it to Syracuse.  Upon getting wind of the sensation, P.T. Barnum got into the act and offered $60,000 to exhibit the Giant for three months; when he was turned down, he simply made his own and displayed it in Manhattan.  Hull was forced to confess his scheme when the owners of ‘his’ Giant sued Barnum for claiming that their fake was a fake – but public interest continued nonetheless, and the Cardiff Giant spawned several similar offspring before fading into obscurity early in the 20th century.

In any event it’s a fantastic name for a racehorse – if he does, indeed, become very successful this year, I hope we can look forward to his offspring with names like Feejee Mermaid, Oak Island and Piltdown Man. If only someone would name a racehorse for Kaspar Hauser, I could continue to be distracted from things like Sidney’s Candy’s fine win in the San Vincente, or Blind Luck’s determination to win despite a terrible ride or the successful return of Munnings…

Lava Man back in training – the ‘Behind the Music‘ version is very informative.

Zenyatta to possibly run a few times next year – hey, that would be half her season this year already! How about Keeneland instead of Santa Anita? It would [...]]]> Time is short today, so we are limited to a few brief bullet points:

Lava Man back in training – the ‘Behind the Music‘ version is very informative.

Zenyatta to possibly run a few times next year – hey, that would be half her season this year already! How about Keeneland instead of Santa Anita? It would be a Good Thing, in any instance.

Cryptoclearance dead – another stud dies, this one very much under-rated.

Human racing – with the Thoroughbred Brief in Kentucky, or me in Delaware. She’s got Secretariat, but I have beer. Or you could just cheer for both of us.

Anglo-Saxon hoard from Staffordshire – this is entirely relevant, as there are plenty of items with horse motifs in said hoard. This is bigger than Sutton Hoo, folks – it’s another chance to try to figure out how many things Bede was just making up about the kings of Mercia (and Anglo-Saxon kingship as a whole).

Indian Blessing takes on Sara Louise in the Gallant Bloom – will both be going to the Filly & Mare Sprint? So far, Sara Louise is proving to be more than just the answer to a trivia question.

Ballydoyle Watch – Rip Van Winkle is almost certain for the Breeders’ Cup Classic (feet permitting), but Yeats will likely bow out in France.

Rachel Alexandra – now accepting fan mail. And why not?

At first glance, the Breeders’ Cup Marathon might seem as though it was designed to attract the European horses bred for longer distances; but while the Marathon is relatively new to the American racing scene, having only been added to the schedule last year, its new 1 3/4 distance is [...]]]> This post also appears on NTRA.com.

At first glance, the Breeders’ Cup Marathon might seem as though it was designed to attract the European horses bred for longer distances; but while the Marathon is relatively new to the American racing scene, having only been added to the schedule last year, its new 1 3/4 distance is one that would have been familiar to American horses in the past – and is still quite relevant to modern breeders looking to demonstrate the stamina in their bloodlines.

American Eclipse (1814-1847) was one of the first nationally-famous racehorses; like his British namesake, he retired undefeated. His specialty was winning races comprised of 3-4 mile heats – and he passed on that enthusiasm for distance to his offspring. His 1826 filly, Black Maria (out of his former rival, Lady Lightfoot), was renowned in her day for having won the Jockey Club purse over Long Island’s Union Course in 1832, after running five 4-mile heats (yes, that’s right – twenty miles in total). We quote from Charles E. Trevathan’s The American Thoroughbred, 1905:

“We wonder if there is a horse on the turf to-day that could stand up under such a performance as this? We fear not, for unfortunately, the English dash system of racing has become too popular on this side of the Atlantic for the good of our stock. We have learned to look too much for speed and to pay too little attention to the more valuable quality of endurance…[i]t is a sad commentary upon our system of racing that a purse for a contest of four miles – a four-mile dash, not heats, please bear in mind – fails to secure a run worthy of the name of race.”

But such long-distance contests were not confined entirely to the 1820s and 1830s; 3-mile heats continued through the 1850s, even as single-heat ‘dashes’ were becoming more popular; later, during the Civil War, the Jersey Derby was a 1 1/2 mile ‘dash,’ although elsewhere on the card were 2-mile heats. The 1870s and 1880s saw distances gradually normalizing to those more familiar to the modern eye, and by the early 20th century, longer races had been consigned largely to history.

However, interest in distance races has been bubbling under the surface in recent years. The Brooklyn Handicap is a longer race again (after many changes over the years), and the 13-furlong Gallant Man Handicap was inaugurated last year at Hollywood Park. Keeneland got in on the act in 2008 as well (thanks, in large part, to the presence of the Marathon on the Breeders’ Cup card) with the Fort Harrod Stakes. These races, as well as the few 1 1/2 mile races scattered throughout the country that are Not The Belmont Stakes, may not make up a huge division at present, but there’s time for growth – and anything that encourages breeders worldwide to remember the long-distance horse as a goal is a worthy endeavor.

And it’s not as though that stamina is missing from American bloodlines – modern distance greats like Ireland’s Yeats and Australia’s Makybe Diva both benefit from surprisingly ‘American’ pedigrees. It’s high time we got to see those stamina influence at work here in the States – and that’s why I’m a Breeders’ Cup Marathon fan.

As many in the archival world know, I write about horse racing. And some in the horse racing world have a vague idea that I’m an archivist, but people in both spheres are [...]]]> It’s typically an extremely rare occurrence when my worlds collide – oddly, this is the second time it has happened this year.

As many in the archival world know, I write about horse racing. And some in the horse racing world have a vague idea that I’m an archivist, but people in both spheres are probably a little unclear about what happens in the other one.

Here’s the short version for each group – first, for the archivists: horses run around a track and I comment on it. American horse racing has a long and storied history that could be more (and here I’m dropping in a professional buzzword) accessible – but more on that later. For the racing folk: archivists preserve documents, photographs, ephemera, etc. from the past so that people (and not just historians) can learn about (and from) that shared past. We also do a lot of complicated things with digitization and metadata – while the usual adjectives employed to describe our profession are ‘dusty’ or ‘musty,’ that’s only a small part of what we do.

Quite often, the archives (and the archivists who work there) are located in the basement – and that becomes a major issue in, say, a flood. The Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs just completed a renovation to their basement (where the storage and, as ever, archives are), including new shelving, when they were hit by a flash flood yesterday.

New shelving to an archivist is a precious commodity – we are rarely lucky enough to get shelving that is truly designed for archival use and it is difficult to raise money for it (as we have been doing in our archives for many a long day) because it’s not immediately apparent to someone outside the profession how much the right shelves help protect and maintain the collection.

But of course, even the best compact shelving cannot save the collections from the archivist’s second-greatest fear – water. At least one of the comments on the Courier-Journal article by Jennie Rees is wondering why the historical collections were stored in the basement, where they would be subject to flooding – and while that may seem unusual to the public, that’s essentially standard practice; except for the few institutions that have successfully implemented a visible storage project, cultural institutions cannot take up exhibit space with shelves and processing space – and you need a large open space for most useful shelving systems. Best practices may seek to get the archives and artifact storage above the flood line, but it rarely happens – indeed, when our archives moves into our new building, we will again be in the basement. (It may come as something of a surprise to some to discover that water damage happens even when collections are stored on higher levels – leaky pipes are a constant source of worry in the archival world).

Regardless of how the water gets in, archivists usually respond in just the way the Derby Museum staff did – by creating a human chain to get the materials and artifacts to higher ground. To add insult to injury, several museum employees lost their cars to the floodwaters while working to save the collections – but the good news is that it seems nothing was lost – just made very wet. Conserving wet materials is not as easy as just letting them dry off – the most effective approach is to have them freeze-dried and dealt with by a disaster mitigation firm. Obviously, that’s not cheap, but some organizations are lucky enough to have insurance to cover those costs – I don’t know whether that’s true of the Museum, but I hope they are able to get their collections back to the pre-flood state I enjoyed when visiting the Museum only last month.

Public libraries are rarely that fortunate – and the Louisville Public Library sustained very serious damage to both the physical plant and the books and computers (as did several of the branch libraries). In their case, a fund has been set up and donations are being accepted; keeping libraries running can be a challenge under the best circumstances, but the combination of a down economy and a major disaster is one that no library director wants to face – it’s a worthy cause.

I mentioned accessibility above and the lack of accessibility to horse racing history was, rather serendipitously, the topic of Teresa Genaro’s article in The Saratogian today (a note to the archivists reading – Teresa writes the rather wonderful Brooklyn Backstrech blog and was one of my co-bloggers for BelmontStakes.com this year). She noted how difficult it was to authoritatively establish basic facts not only from the more distant past, but even statistics from recent years – and as someone on both sides of that fence, I couldn’t agree more with her conclusions. American racing history is fairly widely dispersed – there’s the Keeneland Library, the currently-damp Kentucky Derby Museum, the International Museum of the Horse, the National Museum of Racing and the National Sporting Library and while there is some crossover, for the most part, each has a different collection policy and research goals.

That list does not even begin to take into account an individual racetrack’s holdings (and who knows what happens when they close – where are the records of Ak-Sar-Ben? Who will take on those of Hollywood Park?) including their film and video storage. Other sources of racing history, like the Daily Racing Form or Equibase, tend to be considerably more proprietary about their information. Unlike the aforementioned libraries and museums, making their information accessible is not the goal – and while that makes a certain amount of sense in their business models, it would be nice if they turned their data over to one of the aforementioned institutions or had a records management policy that involved making that data available online (with a preservation copy elsewhere) after a certain time period – I’d be happy to recommend a number of Kentucky-based archivists for the job.

It’s difficult enough for researchers to find the information they are looking for under normal conditions; dealing with a disaster like the flooding in Kentucky makes the archivist’s goal of preserving the past and providing access that much more difficult. The only potential upside is that the spotlight these cultural institutions unwittingly find themselves in brings in some much-needed funds for repairs and, hopefully, future improvements that serve both the collections and the public.

It’s become something of [...]]]> The Courier-Journal notes that all sixteen ‘prominent’ horses should make the Derby field this time around; it’s a bit ironic that in a year which seems to have a much stronger group of three-year-olds than we have likely seen for some time, we may not hit the maximum field of twenty.

It’s become something of an annual tradition at Casa Superfecta to question the need for a twenty-horse field – last year’s edition was a historical primer reflecting on how relatively recent the annual twenty-horse trend is – the first full field for years only came in 2005 (with considerable variation in the decades prior to that). In 2007, I set my own limit of fifteen worthies, while in 2006 it was a general lament that many ‘great’ Derbies had featured smaller numbers of runners – although it must be said that many Triple Crown winners did defeat large fields – Gallant Fox was one of fifteen, Omaha beat an eighteen-horse field, War Admiral faced nineteen other horses (and is thus the only Triple Crown winner from a twenty-horse field), while Assault and Seattle Slew triumphed over seventeen- and fifteen-horse fields, respectively.

To expand on the twenty horses=lower Triple Crown chance, one could argue that those large fields (often filled with at least a generous handful of horses who did not deserve to be there) denied Afleet Alex, Point Given and Risen Star (to name a few) the chance to run their races in the Derby. (Of course, you can equally well make the point that it’s meant to be difficult – it’s certainly a valid position).

But this year may be different; there have been so many obviously talented horses that some owners and trainers whose horses have already faced the top eschelon and come away wanting have wisely decided to prep them for other races – with a few more similar defections from the Derby trail, we may end up with the most competitive field for many long years – and perhaps with a little welcome breathing room.