Sunday Misc.: Weather, Wind, Fasig Tipton

Driving to the office today I leave the Hyvee Grocery with sea of red Chief's fans stocking up for today's game, and the Good Year Blimp overhead floating out to Arrowhead Stadium The scene reminds of the benign divide between fans of sport and participants, and how lucky we are in horse racing to have that choice as trainers, breeders, cosigners, bloodstock, or weekend handicappers were we can sit back and take it all in. Some RR thoughts for Sunday, October 14, 13 days before the end of the Woodland's meet:

WEATHER: muddy mess this morning with 3 meteorological inches falling on us Saturday--little more inevitable in our normally dry area than mid October monsoons, and thus I avoid getting overly excited about the Woodlands Meet since we know what's coming. It'd be nice, of course, to get our horses ready to race "before" the rain hits, but it never seems to happen.

GROOVIN' WIND: After yesterday's cancelled gate work (weather) and due to the recent slow breeze times, last night I was ready to throw in the towel and retire the horse and leave to future conjecture the nagging question whether the Woodlands performances resulted from bleeding or just slow feet Then Nob trot-gallops the horse this morning at the farm 3 miles through deep grass and get's off exclaiming how much stronger Wind is now than at the last farm gallop, and that the horse seems after a couple of weeks of working with the jock, much the race horse. Wow. Guess I'll take Wind back to the track tomorrow and we'll see what comes down.

GATE CARD: 1. We failed to get a gate card Wednesday, and 2. our attempt to get one Saturday was rained out? This sport will just drive you crazy at times. What are the odds that when we went in the gate Wednesday we were the first horse arriving after their horrific gate accident, and they then refused to let the horse come out, followed by Saturday's rain out. We've been one or two breezes from racing for how many Woodland's meets in a row before similar stuff? I'll have to add this year's comedy to our tales of misfortune--"a bird will croak, what does it croak, mishap" (Goethe).

FASIG TIPTON October 22: I've got $9000.00 ready for the sale. BUT, seems an unusually uninspiring catalogue for bottom feeders. For me to be able to buy a prospect I have to have two things come together: 1. An unaware absentee owner with a "specimen" sends their horse into the ring without reserve, and 2. a lull in the bidding--either everybody there is tapped out, or they're all off to lunch. When those things come together we with limited funds can occasionally cherry pick a good horse. Unfortunately, of the colts--which is what I'm looking at--in my price range they're so few in number that the 10 hour drive to Lexington hardly seems worth it. I'm wondering what happened to that nice $2-5000 stud fee that they used to consign to this sale. There's hardly 20 of those (colts) in the entire catalogue, and zero of those are causing me much excitement.

I am looking forward to the next ten days of gallop at the Woodland's with Wind. If his lung problem has cleared up, maybe there's just enough time to decide whether the horse has got anything left.

Training: all other training cancelled due to weather.