On Galileo and matters of gravity...

When I started this blog, I meant only for it to push me into starting a racing partnership and becoming involved in the industry. I did this solely for myself, with no desire to share this with the world. I don't have the discipline to write or keep a journal and when it comes to actually sitting down and putting something on paper, virtual or otherwise, I have the attention span of a cat on meth; besides, when you see someone's journal you think it might be something you want to read. So where can one set down their thoughts without everyone else trying to rummage through them? The middle of a crowd offers wonderful opportunities for inconspicuousness.

I feel about social networking and those that can't stop talking about it the way most people feel about Bush or the supporting characters in Deliverance. At stores, when I am asked for my phone number and zip-code, I make them up. I had no intention of trying to disseminate this page, link it, delicious it or whatever else the hell people do with this but as with the best laid plans of mice and men...here I am, down here with the rest of you. Does the stink ever wear off?

Racing has issues and they are a myriad; this is not the time nor the place to list them. It is in trouble but that has been the case for the past fifty years. Much has been written recently about Big Brown, the Derby, the gallant Eight Belles and BB's dominance over this years crop. There are cries for changes to the industry or its immediate dissolution. Members of the Algonquin Round Table: CNN, Fox, USAToday, Arianna Huffington and PETA have chimed in with their insider's knowledge of the thoroughbred industry to lend them weight. Drugs and medications,legal or not, are rampant and if history is any indication, the Socratic and somber members of Congress will soon subpoena Big Brown to the hill to testify against Dutrow.

IEAH is a hedge fund. Dutrow is a man with his own demons and it is not my place to judge him, all of us in our own way are after all fighting the alligator that is closest to our ass. What I find bizarre and possibly criminally stupid is Dutrow's public claim that he has no idea what Winstrol does but as long as its legal he will let the vet administer it. What the hell is that? How do you 1) admit that and B)keep employing a man who admits that? As a hedge fund manager, in charge of tens of millions of dollars, how do you let your prime asset receive such indifferent care. If I had Big Brown I would hire tasters for his food, maybe death-row inmates or terminally ill people who are in clinical drug studies. I don't know I'm spit-balling here.

Everyone is talking Triple Crown and how Big Brown will save the sport if he wins it. Maybe he wins, I don't know, he has a good shot. I think I could win an Olympic event if I faced REALLY slow people. What I don't think will happen is that, magically, after the Belmont, tracks across the country will be flooded by patrons lining up at the two dollar window. If he wins, Big Brown will NEVER race again. Iavarone is a hedge fund manager but he is not stupid. If he is and made all that money then I am in the wrong business, that though is an entirely different blog. There is no up side, from a financial standpoint, to racing BB after the Belmont if he wins. Iavarone is not a fan or a purist, whatever platitudes he spits out. Whatever the ramifications to the industry, its fan base, the breeders that like lemmings will line up and the ensuing product, IEAH will make a tidy profit from Big Brown and turn the page. And what about the horse? Big Brown is just doing what he knows, better than anybody else out there this year. He won't get to prove anything by winning at Belmont and then he will have an asterisk placed by his name because he happened to be the best of his generation and owned by someone who didn't have the stones or the character to step up to the line and roll the bones.

Big Brown will probably win and the Algonquin Round Table might interrupt their breaking story of a domestic dispute in a trailer park somewhere to cover the festivities. Many pundits will wax philosophically about how he is the best horse of all time and how horse racing needed him to come along at just this moment, this critical juncture in the space-time continuum. He will be hyped as the long awaited hero. The horse that can save the industry. But when Andrea said 'Pity the land that has no hero.' in Bertolt Brecht's play, Galileo sagely counters, 'Pity the land that needs a hero.'