Eblouissante Goes Up To Saratoga

Well, it is not exactly a hot sports weekend, F1 is off until next weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix and the NFL preseason will have to wait for two more weeks when the Cowboys and Dolphins open up with the NFL Hall of Fame Game. But fear not lugnuts, the time seems ripe to let our hair down with some trash talk and there IS one very exciting event on tap to give us the necessary reason.

Yep, the great Zenyatta’s little sister, Eblouissante, is going racing at Saratoga Downs today in a Grade stakes race. The 84 Lumber/Shuvee Stakes that is. From BloodHorse, who has been superb tracking Zenyatta and Eblouissante:

Eblouissante, half sister of 2010 Horse of the Year Zenyatta, will return to the races July 20 when she aims for her first career stakes win in the $200,000 84 Lumber Shuvee Handicap (gr. III) at Saratoga Race Course.

Off since extending her record to 2-for-2 on Jan. 17 in Southern California, the 4-year-old daughter of Bernardini is one of seven fillies and mares entered in Saturday’s 1 1/8-mile race, although she is one of several potential starters in the field cross-entered in other races.

Eblouissante, whose name means “dazzling” in French, did not make her debut until late in her 3-year-old season, posting an easy 4 1/4-length victory going 1 1/16 miles on the synthetic track at Betfair Hollywood Park. Two months later, she scored by 1 3/4 lengths at the same distance in an optional claimer at Santa Anita Park. After some minor issues, she has been training forwardly at Belmont Park since her arrival from the West Coast, most recently breezing seven furlongs in 1:27.18 July 14.

“After she arrived here she has started to fill out,” said trainer John Shirreffs of the imposing filly who stands nearly 17 hands tall. “She has grown a lot and has put on a significant amount of weight, so I’m really happy with the way she has developed over the last month. She looks strong. I think time is the most important ingredient in a horse’s development. Their bodies need a chance to catch up.”

Eblouissante, who is also under consideration for an optional claimer around two turns July 22 at the Spa as well, drew post position 3 for the Shuvee with Junior Alvarado named to ride. She was listed at 4-1 on the morning line.

The race appears to be going off a little after 5:00 pm EST, and I can find no evidence of any live television coverage. Also, sadly Emptywheel’s roving horse racing reporter, Rosalind, will not be able to cover Eblouissante’s trip east from her normal comfy west coast confines of Hollywood Park and Santa Anita. If anybody finds a good live stream or TV coverage, please link in comments.

Otherwise, what you got going today, let’s chat!

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30 replies
  1. rosalind says:

    if you go to the Saratoga Race website, there is a button at the top for “live audio”. you will be able to listen to the race live. upon conclusion they will post a video of the race under “Race Replays”.

    http://www.nyra.com/saratoga/

    (i’m listening to the audio now, they come on and discuss race stuff then go quiet for a while, in case you don’t hear anything at first)

  2. GulfCoastPirate says:

    Uh, bmaz, the most important (and best) golf tournament in the world is going on this week.

  3. Garrett says:

    Saratoga is the nicest place I’ve ever been to watch a horse race. Beats the hell out of Aqueduct, let’s say.

    I miss being able to go over, usually for the good filly or champion mare stakes.

    In Afghanistan news, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf is running for president, it seems. Both expected, and pretty well boggles the mind.

    Short version of his candidacy here. Long substantial version, with a lot of interrelated factors and history, here.

  4. Peterr says:

    Well, it is not exactly a hot sports weekend, . . .

    OBJECTION!

    Tomorrow is the conclusion to the 100th running of the Tour de France, with a first-ever evening finish along the Champs-Elysées. These guys have been riding for three weeks over 3400 km, up and down mountains, in the rain and fog and heat. (Imagine running a marathon. Then running another one tomorrow. Then another one the day after that. Lather, rinse, repeat for three weeks.)

    It will be one helluva party, and with an evening finish, I’ll be able to enjoy it all when I get home from church and sit down to lunch.

    Not exactly a hot sports weekend, my foot.

  5. Peterr says:

    Also, today and tomorrow are the quarterfinal matches of the CONCACAF Gold Cup — the North/Central America championship soccer tournament held every other year. Today Panama beat Cuba and Mexico will play Trinidad & Tobago, with USA v El Salvador and Honduras v Costa Rico on tap for tomorrow.

    Not exactly a hot sports weekend, my (other) foot.

  6. Chetnolian says:

    Quiet weekend!!!!

    And there’s a Test match at Lords in the Ashes series. What’s that? I hear you all ask. It’s that game that’s much more sophisticated than baseball called cricket that much more of the world cares about than baseball and its the oldest of rivals(England v Australia). England are winning (it can take up to five days, well beyond the attention span of a baseball audience).

    Oh and in the Tour de France and the Open Golf (not the British because we were there first a Brit is ahead at the moment.

    Can I go now?

  7. Peterr says:

    (tossing out some Bmaz bait . . .)

    Lawyers for the NCAA are a bit busy these days. It seems that a number of athletes are suing them to be compensated for the use of their image and likenesses. Says the NCAA’s chief lawyer, “Their scheme to pay a small number of student-athletes threatens college sports as we know it.” Since college sports as we know it is all about paying everyone BUT the athletes, yes, sharing this revenue with the athletes would indeed change things rather dramatically. Whether that’s a good thing or not is another issue . . .

    And then there is that other pesky class action suit, which Mike Freeman of CBS Sports describes like this:

    Of the many accusations springing from what is emerging as a historic legal case against the NCAA, the biggest claims negligence in how the governing body of college athletics monitored and handled concussions for its athletes.

    The issues are complicated, but what I mainly wanted to do was examine a number: 29,225.

    That, according to the NCAA’s own injury-tracking data, was the total number of concussions from all NCAA sports from 2004-2009.

    [snip]

    We knew players got concussions in college. However, what the NCAA’s own accounting, crystallized in these documents, shows is that the number of concussions suffered by college football players is greater than commonly known.

    That’s the biggest takeaway from these documents. While the NCAA is accused of numerous things by the plaintiffs (the NCAA’s own internal emails are the most damaging part of the documents) the sheer numbers are what stand out the most.

    Fortunately for these injured players, the NCAA has nothing but their best interests at heart. Right?

  8. Bay State Librul says:

    Nate Silver traded to ESPN.
    Naw, Silver becomes a free agent and motors to ESPN.
    Sports whips politics

  9. bmaz says:

    @GulfCoastPirate: It was unnecessarily so, but meant as a joke. I watched quite a bit of the Open today in between naps. I keep rooting for a Mikkleson charge, but no dice. Hangs around but can’t move up.

  10. GulfCoastPirate says:

    @bmaz: I know. No big deal. I love those courses over there. Grew up on something similar.

    Phil may do OK tomorrow. Lots of golf left to play.

    I’m listening to Jimmy Buffett on Radio Margaritaville (coming out to Vegas for the show in October so getting fired up). His plan for getting Detroit out of bankruptcy is urban farming – growing pot. May work. Seems to be a better plan than the politicians have so far.

  11. Peterr says:

    @GulfCoastPirate: Back in the day, Jimmy had an intriguing foreign policy that matches the domestic policy idea you mentioned. As the Soviet Union was breaking up, he came up with a very interesting proposal:

    And world peace? I’ve got an answer for world peace. We take the money that it’d cost us to build just one B-1 bomber, you know that one that doesn’t work? We change it into five dollar bills. We put all of this money into bags and we fly over the Atlantic Ocean, past Europe (because they’re getting their shit together anyway). We drop this money on the Russian people. All those little tiny pictures of Abraham Lincoln come tumblin’ down out of the sky.

    I want them to feel those sawbucks in their hands. You know how your money feels when you accidentally leave it in your blue jeans and you take it out and it’s all warm and soft, oooh!

    Well we let those Russian people hang on to that money for about a week and then we fly back over there. We fill our airplanes full of mail order catalogs from L.L. Bean. From up in Columbus, Sporty’s Pilot Shop. And Victoria’s Secret!

    The Russian people have this money in their hand, the catalogs come down. They look at those pictures on the opening pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. (Not back in the outdoor section: you know what I’m talking about, right?)

    They got the money, they got the catalogs: they’re going to get the idea. They send all the money back to us to buy the stuff. We have full employment. There’s world peace, and the Russians have crotch-less underwear through the twenty-first century!

    Glad to see Jimmy’s working on domestic policy these days.

  12. JohnT says:

    All is right in the world; THE Giants win!!!!

    Hmm, mebbe I should be a wheelie roving reporter, I’m in Reno this weekend, and it’s only a short drive up to Tahoe

  13. What Constitution? says:

    Mr. Mickelson played well for 63 holes and then played a Sunday back nine that deserved to win the British Open. Virtually perfect for nine holes under withering pressure. Fabulous.

  14. bmaz says:

    @GulfCoastPirate: @Chetnolian: Yessss!!

    I watched it all, but then we had to take our daughter over to ASU for a week long stay on campus engineering camp thing. Now back. It was a magical show on the back nine wasn’t it? You just don’t see that every day. And hot on the heels of his heartache sixth runner up finish at the US Open where he led most of the way. Good stuff. If the Brits could not have one of their own, this wasn’t bad I should think. The shots of his minutes long hug with his wife and daughters walking off the 18th was pretty special.

  15. GulfCoastPirate says:

    Magical indeed! He hit some great shots on the back nine. Now that he’s listened to Butch and put some loft on his driver (2 wood – whatever he calls it) so he can get off his back foot he’s a lot more consistent. My guess is he wins more and Pinehurst next year owes him one.

    Speaking of Butch – when does Tiger swallow his pride and go back begging to be readmitted into the club. Frak, that guy is a mess. He looks like he’s aiming about 30 yards left of the target on every shot. One of the most powerful players in the history of the game and he voluntarily gives up his biggest weapon? I’m beginning to think Nicklaus’s record is safe.

  16. bmaz says:

    @GulfCoastPirate: His game is solid right now in just about every phase. But golf is fickle, it can go as quick as it comes. Sure hope he gets a US Open to round out the career slam; only five others have done it, and it is a very elite group.

    Tiger. So hard to tell. The game is still there if he ever gets his head back. Thing is, he is only 37 and Phil just won the British at 43. Tiger is an athlete, he probably has another 8-9 years of being competitive and capable of winning majors. That is a long time still. You know Nicklaus is rooting that he never gets past 17 though.

  17. JohnT says:

    Didn’t go to the pro am at Edgewood; figured there’d be too much of a crowd. Thought about going to Harrah’s to see if I could see anybody, but decided against it

    Wanna go to the America’s Cup though, when that starts up

    Any soccer fans? Found this really nice photo of Arsenal in 1951 on reddit

    http://i.imgur.com/SLl8I0G.jpg

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