The Breeder's Cup: It's the Best Weekend of the Year

                Yahoo! It’s the best weekend of the year. Like Chanukah and my birthday rolled into one. The only way it could only get better is if I win the Pick Four on Saturday.  And I might. It’s Halloween AND the Breeder’s Cup this weekend.

                

               Halloween is obviously the best official holiday ever. It’s an entire celebration based on getting candy
and hanging out with your friends. No relatives, no fancy dinners. Just fun. The Breeder’s Cup is like that too.

               
              The Breeder’s Cup is like March Madness or the Super Bowl, but better, because it’s horse racing. 13 races. Two days. With the best horses in the world competing for more than $25 million in purse money. Whee!

               
              There were 201 horses pre-entered for this year’s races. There are Milers (minus reigning Horse of the Year Wise Dan, who was recently injured, damn it), there are Sprinters including my personal favorite Big Macher, Turf horses  like Big John B, Fillies and Mares including Stormy Lucy and even tough mares running against the boys, like Reneesgotzip.

               
              These are the races that make gamblers of every stripe tear their hair out.  Professional handicappers start working the numbers weeks in advance and change their picks every time the horses work, breeze or even sneeze. The last is important: Champion Beholder is out of the competition this year after spiking a high fever.  And that changes everything for her race, the Distaff Classic.

               
              Those of us who are amateur two dollar bettors fare even worse. On a normal racing day, you can easily discard a lot of the horses in a race. That doesn’t mean you’ll win of course, but you have to start somewhere.  Not so simple at the Breeder’s Cup. All of these horses had to qualify or pay huge sums of money to enter. They are all really, really good.  Picking the winners of these races is, well, a gamble.

               
              Last week the horses that are competing began to ship in to Santa Anita, the site of this year’s event. They come from tracks around the country and the world.  And every morning it’s free to go to the track and watch them work.

               
              The serious gamblers come out to see how the horses are training and maybe get a tip from someone.  Here’s one: jockeys, jockeys’ agents and trainers always say their horses are going ‘just great’ unless it has just fallen down. And then it’s just regarded as a ‘momentary blip.’

              
               Me? I come for the spectacle. I admit it isn’t easy getting up when it’s dark and cold. The track opens for work at 4:45 am.  My own horses are still fast asleep when I feed them at that hour. (Though they manage to snap to attention pretty quickly when the food arrives…) But it’s worth forcing myself out of bed at an ungodly hour just to see the sun come up over Santa Anita and the mountains in the background.

               
              Even on a non-Breeder’s Cup week, morning works are amazing. The racetrack is filled with horses, both quiet ones and wild ones. Either way, the riders never seem to budge in the saddle or even seem perturbed.  Most of the time riders sitting on the horses that are rearing and leaping around are laughing and grinning. This is fun for them. Personally, I’d be in the dirt. Crying more than likely.  Exercise riders have balls and nerves of steel.

              There are hundreds of horses on the track at a  time, jogging, walking and working. It takes my breath away no matter how many times I see it.

               
              In the week before the Breeder’s Cup, the crowd watching the morning works swells. In addition to the regulars that hang at Clocker’s Corner buying coffee and doughnuts from Rosie, there are hundreds of visitors.

              They include the professional photographers: Barbara Livingston is usually weighed down with three cameras all with enormous telephoto lenses, the Blood-Horse’s Anne Eberhardt is there shooting away, and so are hordes of freelancers.  If you don’t recognize a famous horse as it goes by, the clicks of the automatic shutters are a dead giveaway. The photographers know all of the horses.

               
              That’s not necessarily the case for the rest of us.  Face it, when there are 100 horses on the track, a lot of the bay horses with a blaze look alike. Except for American Pharaoh.  Poor baby; somebody ate his tail when he was a foal and it’s never grown back.  (Even worse this morning he was scratched  from the Juveniles due to a lameness issue. With any luck he’ll be well enough for next year’s Derby trail.)

              The people at the BC have made it easy.  The week of the event, competing horses work in the morning with special saddle cloths that have their name and their race color coded on them. There’s also a handy sheet, provided by Santa Anita identifying the horses, which makes it slightly easier to spot them as the fly by on the track in the morning.

               
               The contingent of European shippers always stands out. Usually they wear matching half blankets and they walk on and off the track precisely in a line.  More often than not, their tails are banged, or cut evenly. It’s a European thing. Gambling hint: in the turf races, don’t bet against the European horses – it’s their specialty and they didn’t travel 5000 miles to lose.

               
              I don’t have any deep preferences for this year’s races.  While I am a big fan of the aforementioned Big Macher, I like both Shared Belief and California Chrome in the big race, the Breeder’s Cup Classic.  But since Zenyatta retired, I haven’t given my heart to any horse that isn’t mine.

                Which makes the two days pure fun for me. I bring just enough money that I can lose  without crying, I meet up with good friends from out of town, and best of all – I get to watch amazing racehorses do their thing in a beautiful setting.

              Then I can come home and eat leftover Halloween candy. I can’t think of a better way to spend a holiday.