Found this little gem while watching an interesting 2-year-old maiden replay from Belmont today (Tim Ice trainee, second place finisher was impressive too).
Enjoy your weekend!
Posted by dana on Jun 18 2010
Filed Under: YouTube, Internet, 2010, 2yo, NYRA, OTB, TV, Racing
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Sponsors! In a time of shrinking budgets it’s extremely cheery making when an advertiser choses the Hello Race Fans Ad Network to publicize their events and products. A big thanks to our current our advertisers!
Sam Houston is running a geo-targeted campaign, so if you’re in the Houston area and you see the Sam Houston ad, click on over and check them out… and get yourself to the track!
Totebet offers a sign-up bonus, rebates and co-mingles funds into the track’s pools. If you’re looking for a new platform, click on over!
And finally, Monmouth/Meadowlands has started a campaign with us… their incredibly fun Survival at the Shore game is back! Click on over and sign-up!
Again, many thanks to our sponsors! We hope we can help get the word out about their products… and in turn we’re grateful not only for the support of independent content publishers (and our Fan Education site, which is what we use our portions of the ad revenue for!), but for the chance to help them broaden the reach of their brands.
Please visit our sponsors when you see their ads!
(And now that we’ve reached part 3, I will retire Reasons to be Cheerful, even if there continue to be more reasons)
Posted by dana on May 08 2010
Filed Under: Hello Race Fans, 2010, Internet, Monmouth Park, You Can Help, Site Related, Ads
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(wendyu) The Homeboykris crew on the walk over, the embodiment of cheerful!
Sure, I could focus on all my horrid plays yesterday and how I stupidly left Ice Box off my tickets, especially since 1) I deliberated between using him and Mission Impazible and 2) I had Paddy O’Prado on my tickets, but I’m going to choose to be cheerful today, after all, it’s not often one calls the Derby winner publicly (so I’m going to enjoy it while I can… and sorry for the long sentence).
Since I’m not blogging a much these days, here are some things I had to say elsewhere about Super Saver… over at Twitter there was a discussion going on re: Super Saver and at least one esteemed colleague (@o_crunk) wasn’t buying him. My thought was this:
Reading Val’s piece for Hello Race Fans! on pedigree and Derby Distance + the reports out of Churchill that he was looking good in the morning definitely informed my thought process. Over at the other evil social media site, Facebook, I commented to a friend about my choice:
The services of one Mr. Calvin Borel aren’t too shabby either… but more than that, I think he got something out of his last two races and looked to me be getting underway at the end of the race last out. From what I’ve read his breeding suggests the distance should be no problem, which lines up with how I interpreted what I saw. I’m pretty jazzed about his odds too! (editor’s note: before they went south)
(Note: Facebook is so evil in fact that I can’t even directly link to that post!)
So, while I would have liked to have turned that into a nice score, my future wagers kept the weekend from being a total blood bath… and my parade play of Le Grand Cru in the Westchester. I’m now one for one at Belmont!
Also cheery making is that both Oaks and Derby handle were up, despite the massive AmTote crash that effected XpressBet, TwinSpires and a few tracks. On the bright side, at least it was clear on TwinSpires that a bet had gone through or not! On the downside I’m still annoyed over TwinSpiresTV blocking the Churchill simulcast signal. I’m still trying to find out more about that, so far I’ve gathered that Churchill was broadcasting it’s signal and leaving it up to the individual outlets to decide what to do with it, but nothing specifically about TwinSpiresTV.
At any rate, I’m still remaining cheerful… and might even do a couple of more blog posts!
Posted by dana on May 02 2010
Filed Under: Twinspires, Twitter, 2010, Super Saver, Internet, Churchill Downs, Derby Trail, Triple Crown, Calvin Borel, Kentucky Derby, Racing
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...For those who think that banks and Facebook are evil, I have news for you… evil+evil=doing some good. At least in the case of Chase Community Giving, which is only available on Facebook!
It can be incredibly powerful when your vote has a local impact. Chase is giving away $5 million to various charities and needs you to help pick which ones. Simply vote for your favorite nonprofit and then get friends and others on Facebook to do the same. Give your charity the recognition it deserves and needs with Chase Community Giving.
Interesting, no? I mean, being on Facebook can’t be ALL time wasting can it? The program allows people to help charities with no financial outlay by giving everyone who installs the app a whopping 20 votes. I haven’t even used all of mine yet!
The distribution is interesting too:
More than 500 nonprofits with an operating budget of $10 million or less will be eligible. The charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each, and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each.
And, in case you’re starting to wonder if this has anything to do with racing, it does. There are plenty of racing charities vying for part of that $5 million dollars, and they need your help. As I clicked around the other night trying to find them all (not as easy as it seems) I noticed that plenty of the charities listed below only had a few votes and in some cases I was the first person to vote! That’s not too promising considering that I’ve seen a couple with votes in the hundreds (one of them being Old Friends!).
So, for those of you Facebook this is a no brainer… get clicking! And for those of you not on Facebook, now’s your chance to join with the clear conscious that only helping a charity can provide.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this list is not all inclusive, so please leave a comment with a link if you know of any I missed! There’s no browsing mechanism so I was just searching on terms like “thorougbred”, “racehorse” “jockey” “backstretch” etc to see what I could find. While not specifically racing related, I also gave one of my votes to Wikimedia, aka Wikipedia as without Wikipedia I would know a lot less about racing and it’s history.
So, here’s the list… the name of charity links to the page in Facebook to vote for it. I’ve also included a link to the charity’s website where available. If you have a racing charity and are not yet participating, get over and sign up! And then let me know about it so I can add it here.
Backstretch Clubhouse
more info
Backstretch Education Fund Inc
website
Backstretch Employee Service Team Of New York Inc (BEST)
website
Don Macbeth Memorial Jockey Fund
website
Florida Thoroughbred Charities Inc
website
Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation
website
Illinois Equine Humane Center
website
New England Thoroughbred Retirement Center
website
New Vocations Racehorse Adoption
website
Permanently Disabled Jockey’s Fund
website
Racehorse Redemption Inc
more info
Thoroughbred Charities of America
website
Thoroughbred Rehab Center
more info
Thoroughbred Retirement Center
website
Washington Thoroughbred Foundation
more info
Posted by dana on Dec 06 2009
Filed Under: Internet, Impressive, 2009, :), You Can Help, Retirement, Rescue, Research, Racing
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...“Is blogging dead?” was a question posed by my esteemed colleague John of The Race is not to the Swift. He rightfully points out that other options such as Twitter and Facebook are easier outlets than blogging. Indeed.
I commented that as an example, I had posted several tweets of stuff I encountered while twirling around the web last night and had I not been on Twitter that they would have probably ended up as a blog post. As an experiment, of sorts, here’s what I probably would have written had I not had twitter:
While poking around on Hulu after finding an explanation of a tote board to post over here, I found this interview with Mike Watchmaker on Charismatic’s Triple Crown Bid on Charlie Rose. This made me wonder if Charlie Rose did any interviews prior to Big Brown’s Triple Crown attempt, and alas he did!
Since I didn’t really know much about Charismatic or racing in 1999 in general, I looked a little further. I watched the 1999 Belmont to see if any of Watchmaker’s predictions were right (they were not).
And imagine my surprise when I discovered the Charismatic / Chris Antely story, which I knew nothing about! Upon checking out Charismatic’s wiki page I discovered that an ESPN 30 for 30 episode is currently in development on the Charismatic / Antley story (thanks to @raceday360 for the ESPN link), very exciting! Apparently, there’s also a book on the saga entitled Three Strides Before the Wire (via @BklynBckstretch).
And as if all this wasn’t exciting and interesting enough, Haskin also has a compelling post about trainers who are still working that “once ruled the sport“. A true and proven talent not being able to sell themselves and ending up in relative obscurity is not a new phenomenon and certainly not limited to horse racing. History is littered with examples of artists, writers, musicians, etc who suffered the same fate, but as Jessica put it:
I still look at Turner and marvel, that trainer knows what it is to win the Triple Crown.
Here’s a recent trainee of his, Reforestation, hitting the board at 48-1 in the 2009 Grade 1 Prioress at Belmont.
Turner trains for Castle Village Farms, if money bags owners won’t work with the last trainer to win a Triple Crown there’s no reason why you can’t!
Posted by dana on Dec 04 2009
Filed Under: Big Brown, Internet, Racing History, 2009, Twitter, Steve Haskin, Legend, Belmont, Triple Crown, Belmont Stakes, TV, Racing
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