This Side Up

In the end, things work because they work. We try stuff, often if not always with the best intentions, and see whether it gains our trust. Lived experience, among horsemen and fans, will eventually tell us whether an experiment has failed or whether, once every generation or so, we might have struck a game-changing seam of gold. The Breeders' Cup was one such; and, who knows, maybe a similar hostility from vested interests will ultimately prove the furnace in which HISA can be forged into another. That may seem a...

So we get another day of sun, after all, out in La La Land. It was not so long ago that a night without end appeared to have descended on Santa Anita. Like Ryan Gosling's character in the film, fighting his quixotic rearguard action on behalf of jazz, we were clinging to the wreckage of a culture renounced by 21st Century society. "I'm letting life hit me till it gets tired," he protests to his sister. "Then I'm going to hit back. It's a classic rope-a-dope."

So we get another day of sun, after all, out in La La Land. It was not so long ago that a night without end appeared to have descended on Santa Anita. Like Ryan Gosling's character in the film, fighting his quixotic rearguard action on behalf of jazz, we were clinging to the wreckage of a culture renounced by 21st Century society. "I'm letting life hit me till it gets tired," he protests to his sister. "Then I'm going to hit back. It's a classic rope-a-dope." If we're honest, that's...

How poignant that, in this of all weeks, the two most breathtaking winners on Belmont day should both have prompted comparisons with Ghostzapper, whose GI Breeders' Cup Classic at Lone Star Park in 2004 was surely the greatest Thoroughbred performance ever on Texan soil. Because while the whole racing world came to Dallas that day, it appears that there will be no reciprocal embrace when it comes to the standards sought—not just federally, but internationally—to give American horseracing credibility in the contest for public engagement in the 21st Century. It's...

The bit that most concerns us, naturally, is that the race is not to the swift-albeit ours is a business that will also disclose, fairly reliably, that nor is the battle to the strong; bread to the wise; riches to men of understanding; or favor to those of skill. "Time and chance happen to them all."

"Wait a minute, haven't I seen you before? I know your face... You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big." "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." That, unforgettably, is how we meet Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard; and that, you fear, is rather how we meet the faded star of Memorial Day Weekend. Aptly, the first name carved onto the Hollywood Gold Cup has itself become that of an Oscar nominee. Seabiscuit was followed by some of the icons of...

I'm pinning my faith in Happy Jack. Not to win, obviously, even after a Derby so outlandish that it still confounds the handicapper's genius for rationalizing the most unaccountable events with the invincible benefit of hindsight. As a Calumet homebred by Oxbow, however, you can certainly envisage this fellow proceeding to the GI Belmont S. and so ensuring that at least one horse has contested each leg of the Triple Crown--which would, dismally, be one more than was managed last year even by a crop containing Oxbow's outstanding son to...

I'm pinning my faith in Happy Jack. Not to win, obviously, even after a Derby so outlandish that it still confounds the handicapper's genius for rationalizing the most unaccountable events with the invincible benefit of hindsight.

Well, I guess it's precisely because the protagonists aren't used to the limelight that everybody has so enjoyed their arrival at center stage. But they have quickly learned that once there, with everyone hanging on your every word, you had better know your script. In the excitement of his success, under one of the most remarkable rides in GI Kentucky Derby history, connections of Rich Strike (Keen Ice) told everyone that they had the previous morning been reconciled to instead contesting the GIII Peter Pan S. at Belmont this weekend....

"The Derby gods." It's a device that tells us rather more about us than them. We know there's no such thing, really; and that if they did exist, they would find sadistic satisfaction in stringing us along in the delusion that they will ultimately even out their torments and benedictions, only to let the ground fall away beneath us just as we reach for the stars.

We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of "modernization"—a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment.

(Listen to this story by clicking the play button below.) [audio mp3="https://wp.tdn.pmadv.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/202204-v1-This-Side-Up-April-15.mp3"][/audio] We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of "modernization"--a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment. Nobody can sensibly deny that a great deal of change has indeed been for the better. Few who honor her memory at Keeneland on Saturday, I'm sure, would like to have been...