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Things not going well at Churchill Downs: horses dying.


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22 minutes ago, troph said:

It’s an awful sport and I don’t support it, horses are amazing animals and have made human life more enjoyable and easier, they are truly sentient, deserve better, their trust in people is misplaced and watching them run is so beautiful and jaw dropping inspiring.

Those horses are beautiful when they run, and it is what they were born to do, but like a lot of things, humans have corrupted it beyond salvation.  I have a copy of the photo of Secretariat’s jockey looking back over his shoulder at Belmont hanging up in my office at home, because it was the singular most dominant performance in the history of sports. It sits next to a photo of Jesse Owens receiving the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics standing above 2 Nazis doing the Heil Hitler salute.

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Whole family on my dad's side raised, marketed, and sold quarterhorses.  A few still do.  Summer vacations were always either Bandera of Riodoso, NM.  Two places within driving distances that have Q-horse tracks.  
What's the old saying in ranching that applies to horses:  how do you make a million?  Start with five.....
The horse is the cheapest part of the equation.  Truck.  Tack.  Vet bills.  Land and pens.  Trailer and food.  It's ridiculous.  

Dash For Cash?
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12 hours ago, fattyflattie said:

How long ago was that?  The Bandera one was closed as long as I can remember.  Maybe when I was very young I think I remember it open. I know it stood vacant forever. 

Long time.  I was just a kid

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12 hours ago, Gil Bang said:

 “We are absolutely delighted to have a woman of Bo's background and stature join us at Del Mar,” said DMTC's CEO Joe Harper. “She is a top 5 all-time hot piece of ass, and still looks damn fine in her 60`s. I think I speak for the entire board when I say we eagerly look forward to sniffing her seat after she excuses herself to use the restroom." 

 

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21 hours ago, Gene Parmesan said:

There was a netflix doc series a while ago about corruption in sports.  One of the episodes dealt with dressage horses.  The owners would end up in a money pinch and have their horses killed in order to collect insurance payouts.

Bad Sport. Great series. The episode about Randy Lanier funding an entire Indy 500 team by selling entire freighters full of weed was fascinating. 

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21 hours ago, Underdog said:

Quite possibly the most dominating performance in all of sports... 

 

Big Red was all “hold on tight and don’t fall off, I’m dropping the hammer on these losers.”

and I think the strategy with Sham was to stay with him all race, as he usually started slow.  Then he got into a drag race and I’m sure that jockey was thinking all kinds of things about what his horse was capable of and the other horse had to slow down eventually. 
 

and he’s still 2 seconds faster than anyone else at 1.5 miles. 

Edited by Pato del Muerto
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51 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Big Red was all “hold on tight and don’t fall off, I’m dropping the hammer on these losers.”

and I think the strategy with Sham was to stay with him all race, as he usually started slow.  Then he got into a drag race and I’m sure that jockey was thinking all kinds of things about what his horse was capable of and the other horse had to slow down eventually. 
 

and he’s still 2 seconds faster than anyone else at 1.5 miles. 

Camera view couldn’t get any wider. Lol. 

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22 hours ago, Gene Parmesan said:

There was a netflix doc series a while ago about corruption in sports.  One of the episodes dealt with dressage horses.  The owners would end up in a money pinch and have their horses killed in order to collect insurance payouts.

Was gonna say, the quick trigger pull is that a lot of these horses are worth more money dead than alive once it is figured out they are not going to be top flight champions/contenders on a regular basis.  

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4 hours ago, Surly Bevo said:

Was gonna say, the quick trigger pull is that a lot of these horses are worth more money dead than alive once it is figured out they are not going to be top flight champions/contenders on a regular basis.  

"Don't tell me the odds!"

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On 6/2/2023 at 7:10 PM, Homercles said:

Every single woman I’ve ever met who is still heavy into horses, as an adult, has been batshit crazy.  

And how many of them have very long hair like a mane?

someone in Wyoming once told me “there ain’t no short haired horse bitches”

 

that obviously doesn’t include the hags that don’t give a shit about horses but love horse racing. 

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Although there are bad actors in every country, almost all of the negative issues being discussed here are specific to the US. We have the most fucked up breeding system, sales system, track management, drugs, and political corruption. Almost every major country in the world does it better than us. As a result, we have more horse die than other countries, and it’s not even close. Hell, in the UK they have these supposedly fragile animals jumping over obstacles in the middle of races and we can’t get them to turn left without breaking down.

I am a small part of an ownership group trying to fix things from the inside, but it’s an uphill battle. We are slowing getting people on different boards, but every state is it’s own little kingdom that doesn’t want to give up control. Additionally complicating the system is the number of horses bred each year is declining. This puts tracks in competition with each other for horses, which gives trainers too much power. Local jurisdictions are scared to crack down on drugs because the dirty trainers will leave with all their horses. It’s a cluster but some of us will keep fighting for doing right by the horses and the honest people in the game.

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