• Australia in the 2004 / 2005 season had approximately 31,000 registered racehorses. The state of Maryland has 87,000. I have no idea (i.e. haven’t bothered to look) what the whole of the US adds up to, but thought that this was scary enough
  • Just like here, no one goes to the races, except for the big days. On my day at Pimlico, the crowd would have numbered in the low thousands, but the Preakness day was already sold out with crowds of well over 100,000 expected
  • Just like here, the off peak track days attract the smallest and most degenerate crowd imaginable (see later entry)
  • I love racing on dirt. My life’s goal from this point forward is to get all Australian racing transferred to dirt. It really has a better feel to it. The horses and jockeys come back coated in the stuff, there doesn’t seem to be the same issues of track bias (a truck goes around the track smoothing and watering it between races) and the terms are just better - track ratings included “sloppy” and “frozen”. What more could you want.
  • The races on turf (it was a mixed day, alternating races on the dirt and the turf) were incredibly slowly run. Something like a full 3 seconds slower for 1200 metres than here, in essentially the same quality racing. Could be the extremely tight track or it could just be the style of racing - balls out, all the way. But if the latter, surely someone would just train something to sit and sprint from 600 and take them all to the cleaners?
Date: May 8th, 2007 · Comments RSS · Tags: The Track