Triple Crown: The Middle Child

I once again have to try and find something interesting to say about Pimlico.

Preakness Trivia

• Actually 2 years older than the Kentucky Derby.
• Shortest in distance (1/16th shorter than the Derby).
• Only the Derby has a larger attendance.
• No Black Eyed Susan has ever been used, currently it’s painted Chysthanthemums.

There have been 34 winners of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes including the 11 Triple Crown winners.

Preakness Traditions

Winners don’t get the real Woodlawn Cup to keep, but a half size replica (oh, and the Woodlawn Racing Club is defunct).  Black Eyed Susans don’t bloom until 2 months after the Preakness.  The Old Clubhouse was destroyed in a fire in 1966.  They paint the winner’s racing silks on the weathervane.  No one on the internet knows why it’s called the Alibi Breakfast.

Official Website

I need a drink-

Post time 6:20 pm ET, coverage starts at 4:30 pm on NBC.

I once saw a future Miss America almost eaten by a horse.

Ok, so she wasn’t a Miss America, but she was one of the 10 finalists.

We were on this band trip (she played French Horn, was the practice Piano player for Choir, and sang- rather badly as I recall which is why she got stuck playing Piano) and we went to this ski resort in Pennsylvania where I and my room mates mostly amused ourselves by doing a lot of superficial “damage” like draping our underwear over the lamps and taking the mattresses off the beds (they wouldn’t let us on the bus for the trip home until we “fixed” it which took like a whole 5 minutes).

For me it was notable for this big scar I got while skiing (I’m quite good by the way) when this football player plowed into me at full tilt and opened up a remarkably large wound on my shin with his edge through a teeny tiny little hole in my jeans.  Hardly even noticed it until my boot started filling up with blood.

So one of the other things you could do was horse riding which was a big thrill for me since I went to the boy’s camp with the lake and not the girl’s camp with the horses and the only other time I’d been on the back of one was this sad nag at the fair who was chained to a not very Merry-go-round and even though we didn’t get much past a stately amble at least we were going somewhere.

Future Miss America was two horses in front so I saw it all.  It had started to snow a little, the path was getting slippery and her horse’s hoof went out and kicked the horse behind.

Who got a little ticked, climbed up on the back of her horse and started biting her.

Well, she went the emergency room, I got the aid station at the slope where the patrol person took a look and said- “That’s nothing, just a scratch.  Are you sure you want a band aid?”

I dunno, does it have Spongebob on it?

Some Peakness coverage from The New York Times.

Witnesses to Horse Racing’s Two Sides

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN, The New York Times

Published: May 17, 2013

Joe Miller and Jimmy McCue work in different environments at the same racetrack. McCue, 66, has been a staff photographer at Pimlico Race Course since 1970. Miller, 50, has been the track’s equine ambulance driver since 1997, though he has worked there since 1981.

They represent the intriguing, underexposed dichotomy of a troubled industry. McCue records the light with his camera; Miller, more often than he would like, hauls away the darkness in his ambulance.

…

Miller does not see happy faces. He sees injured animals, distraught owners and shattered dreams.

He watches each race from the superintendent’s office, a shack a quarter-mile from the winner’s circle between the one-quarter and the three-sixteenths poles.

The cumulative effect of transporting injured horses has made Miller distance himself emotionally from the thoroughbreds for whom he once cared.

“It might be a horse I’ve hauled off for whatever reason,” he said. “A couple months later, or six months later, he comes back and runs and wins. I don’t pay attention to them. If he’s going to take the last ride, I don’t want to know who he is.”

At Preakness, Orb’s Challengers Include Childhood Friend

By JOE DRAPE, The New York Times

Published: May 17, 2013

BALTIMORE – They shared the same paddock and gamboled in the same Kentucky bluegrass as weanlings and yearlings. Orb hit the ground first at Claiborne Farm, with Departing tumbling out of his mother a month later. Now 3 years old, the two horses will be reunited Saturday in the 138th running of the Preakness Stakes.

Preakness Champion, and Mother, Toughs It Out

By MELISSA HOPPERT, The New York Times

Published: May 18, 2013

LEXINGTON, Ky. – On a sun-drenched May morning on the 460-acre Stonestreet Farm, Rachel Alexandra, a member of racing royalty, emerged from a 16-by-16 oak-paneled stall in a barn named Cabernet.

She showed no signs of distress as she did the day after giving birth to a 140-pound filly by Bernardini in February. Rachel Alexandra, who in 2009 became the first filly to win the Preakness Stakes in 85 years, was nearly back to her old self as her hooves clip-clopped on the asphalt on the way to her paddock.

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