Supposedly they had the raw time slower than the official time (I think it was three-tenths of a second). Guess that assumes Beyer doesn\'t have someone timing it. You\'d know better than me whether that is enough of a difference for a 1 instead of a Ghostzapper number.

Believe me, Ehalt is a Ragozin user.

Jerry,
Here\'s a list of horses he\'s gotten from other trainers in the last five years (it\'s not exhaustive, doesn\'t didn\'t include horses who only had a few previous races before the switch):
A. P. Arrow
Bad Mover
Ball Four
Bribon
Fleet Indian
Giant Mover
Go Go Shoot
Hilda\'s Passion
Hour Glass
Lawyer Ron
Le Grand Cru
McVictory
Quality Road
With Flying Colors
Z Humor

Barry,

Ironic, I was researching something from 1974 in Horsemen\'s Journal magazine the other day and came across a story you wrote about California surpassing Kentucky\'s foal crop total that year. What a disaster. Jeff Lowe

Posted: Friday, March 13, 2009 12:42 PM

ESPN cuts Oaks from Derby week coverage

TTimes

ESPN has drastically reduced its racing schedule for the week leading up to the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1), including the elimination of a live Kentucky Oaks (G1) broadcast.

The network's only live coverage will be five hours on Kentucky Derby day prior to the NBC broadcast that will feature the race.

Last year, ESPN had a total of 11 live hours during Derby week, including an hour for the post-position draw on Wednesday and three hours on Oaks day on Friday.

"As I understand it, they've just decided to pull back a bit on the racing coverage," said John Asher, vice president of communications for Churchill Downs. "Regrettably, the Oaks day coverage will not be there this year. We know it's an unusual landscape out there and people are having to make tough decisions, and this is one that we hate to see, but let's hope it's a one-year respite."

Plans for the Derby post-position draw have not been finalized. Asher said the format would probably not change.

ESPN spokesman Mark Mandel said the Derby day schedule would consist of \"Today at the Kentucky Derby\" from noon to 3 p.m. EDT and \"Kentucky Derby Special\" from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., which will include the Woodford Reserve Turf Classic Stakes (G1), Humana Distaff Stakes (G1), Churchill Downs Stakes (G2), Eight Belles Stakes (G3), and Churchill Downs Turf Mile Stakes (G3).

Last year, the network had six hours of live coverage on Derby day.

The owners of the Triple Crown host racetracks—Churchill Downs Inc., the Maryland Jockey Club, and New York Racing Association—negotiate ESPN's live coverage throughout the series, in conjunction with the television production company Winnercomm.

Churchill does have a new relationship with the Bravo network that will include an hour of live coverage during Oaks day as part of events tied in with Susan G. Komen for the Cure to raise funds for breast cancer research and awareness. Bravo is part of the NBC family.

Adam Freifeld, director of communications for NBC Sports, said Bravo would air the Oaks live during the hour.

Television stations WAVE-3 in Louisville and WLEX-18 in Lexington carry the Oaks in their markets.

The card also will air on HRTV, which is partially owned by Churchill Downs Inc.

Jeff Lowe is a THOROUGHBRED TIMES staff writer

ESPN Derby week, 2009
Derby day, May 2
Today at the Kentucky Derby    noon—3 p.m.
Kentucky Derby Special            3 p.m.—5 p.m.

Friedman thinks the Dubai horses would have to improve 15 lengths to win at Churchill. Huge disparity
I\'m curious why I Want Revenge has been breezing in front wraps. He\'s never worn them in a race and he wasn\'t training with them at SA. I know Smarty Jones, Street Sense, and Big Brown all won wearing front wraps. Just curious.

No coupled entries in the Derby anymore. Every horse is an individual interest

Mark Casse has a theory that horses with turf pedigrees run better on the dirt at Churchill than on other dirt tracks. I\'m not sure how much evidence he bases it on (he did set a spring meet record for victories there in \'88), but here\'s what he said last spring before the Derby:  
\"A lot of racetracks when the horses\'s foot goes in the dirt, it goes in really deep. A lot of horses, especially a turf horse, get a lot of slippage. They lose traction. At Churchill, there isn\'t as much depth to the surface, at least in the spring.\"
Pletcher\'s take, at the same time last spring:
\"I think Churchill is a surface that turf horses sometimes do well on the dirt, more so than a lot of other tracks.\"

Saudi Arabia, not Dubai. Velazquez rode a horse for Tom Albertrani in the maiden race, finished up the track. Don\'t know whose choice that was

Not finding anything in DRF archives about him getting thrown out of Monmouth. He ran 19 horses there last summer and others at the Meadowlands. He did spend a summer at Arlington in 2007 but that doesn\'t mean he was banned, unless you can show me otherwise.
Regarding Wolfson, my experience is that you won\'t find citations of a trainer being clean. Same reason the newspaper doesn\'t run a list of people who DON\'T drive under the influence.
If you\'re going to say a guy\'s dirty (or a vandal), you better have something to back it up.

I\'m not dismissing any distrust for Wolfson, but I can\'t come up with any suspensions he\'s had recently (last five or six years). Maybe I\'m mistaken.
The stuff about Walder is slander if you can\'t back it up with proof.

From the CTBA
The UC Davis lab is overseen by Dr. Rick Arthur, the equine medical director of the CHRB and a CTBA member. He believes one of racing's biggest problems is that the general public makes no differentiation between drugs legally used for therapeutic purposes and illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
\"That's the perception even though it doesn't make sense to many veterinarians,\" Arthur said.


Reality is that Pletcher doesn\'t even allow clenbuterol in his barn to avoid situations like this, and that\'s a drug that\'s abused every day right in front of our faces that takes money out of horse players\' wallets. Instead of focusing our outrage on real issues and trying to motivate change, we\'re talking about an overage for an antibiotic, one of two positives in a 12-year career. Makes a lot of sense.

I believe he called the stewards on Friday, said he forgot to declare it at entry. For what that\'s worth

Larry Colmus and Trevor Denman announced several times that the O\'Brien horses would have Lasix, including in the first announcement of changes at about 8:30 or 9 Pacific time. The big question would be why that information wasn\'t relayed in the simulcast feed.

It\'ll be very interesting to see whether a lot of jockeys make comments like this after riding horses for Sadler, Mitchell, Miyadi, etc.

JOSE VALDIVIA JR., GET FUNKY, 9-5 FAVORITE, SECOND: "The only thing I can think of is the heat sapped him, because he was just a little too quiet in the post parade, and he usually gets a little worked up. He was way too quiet. Even though they were going fast, he usually takes a hold of the bridle . . . I think today he ran second on class alone."