While all attention is on Saratoga on this Travers Day weekend, the White Pine Races at the county fairgrounds in Ely last week reminded me about what I love about horse racing at its most basic.
Mike Brunker
Columnist: Horse racing
Email: mbrunker@reviewjournal.com
Phone: (702) 383-4656
Mike Brunker is an assistant city editor working with reporters covering land use and environment, health care and immigration. He also writes a weekly horse racing column. Before joining the Review-Journal in August 2016, Brunker worked in various reporting and editing capacities for NBCNews.com, msnbc.com and the San Francisco Examiner.
While there appears to be a standout in the marquee race on Saturday, the wide-open Del Mar Handicap and Del Mar Oaks add wagering interest.
The multi-day $200,000-guaranteed summer tournament at Wynn Las Vegas had a relatively steep entry fee of $2,000, but offered players the chance to win big money.
A spokesman for City Racing, a partnership of four British companies, confirmed the partnership is interested in hosting a pop-up horse racing event in Las Vegas and said it has had preliminary discussions with local officials.
The Triple Crown winner’s untimely departure after he suffered an apparently minor ankle injury demonstrates the unhealthy sway that high-end thoroughbred breeders hold over the sport of horse racing.
Though the calendar claims that summer started on June 21, horseplayers know the season doesn’t really begin until Del Mar and Saratoga open their doors. Now we can break out the sun lotion and get the party started!
Kelsey Riley of Lexington, Kentucky, is one of 40 riders preparing for the world’s longest horse race at 1,000 kilometers (more than 620 miles). They will attempt to traverse the Steppe in 10 days aboard 25 “semi-wild” Mongolian horses.
The stellar card features five graded stakes races, topped by the $1.2 million Belmont Derby Invitational, a 1 1/4-mile inner turf tussle for 3-year-olds that has drawn a field of top sophomores from the U.S. and Europe.
Experiential Squared’s Myracehorse app enables those who want to speculate to buy into an active racehorse or a promising prospect for as little as $100.
In the year since this column debuted, we have handicapped 94 races at 24 different tracks and show a profit of $20.10 on a mythical $2 win bet on the handicappers’ top picks. That works out to a return on investment of $2.20.
A chain of events during the early stages of the race that appear to have been orchestrated to achieve a Triple Crown sweep by Justify leave a sour taste in the mouths of many racing fans.
The Bob Baffert-trained son of Scat Daddy already had rewritten racing’s history books by breaking the so-called “Curse of Apollo,” becoming the first horse to win the Kentucky Derby without having raced as a 2-year-old.
Kerry Thomas, a self taught equine sports psychologist, says the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner “has the mental aptitude and physical ability to win the Triple Crown.”
Racing fans who watched the second jewel of the Triple Crown came away with two distinct impressions of the race: Either Justify showed his mettle when tested for the first time or he showed he’s topped out and is on the way down.
The Kentucky Derby winner is 2-5 on the morning line for the second jewel of the Triple Crown, but he still has some questions to answer.