Caradoc Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Early in the '80's at Saratoga. NYRA carded a
> stakes for NY-breds. At the time, I was working
> in the barn of Hall of Famer James Maloney, who
> trained a fast and talented filly named Move It
> Now. Maloney entered her to run against the boys
> in that stakes. We led her over, she was saddled,
> warmed up, and as she was circling behind the gate
> waiting to be loaded, the starter sprung the
> latch. Maloney turned on his heel and went
> straight at a high rate of speed, cursing, for the
> racing secretary's office. No telling what might
> have happened had we not intercepted him. So it
> has happened before.
>
> I notice that at Del Mar, an assistant starter
> stands in front of the gate during the loading,
> signals the starter as the last runner is being
> loaded, then moves behind the gate. Regardless, no
> excuse for a starter making that mistake, if it
> was not a mechanical failure. It's not a judgment
> call.
>
> Strange day yesterday! Never saw a horse literally
> trample a seagull during the running of a race but
> that happened in the Marshall Jenney at Parx.

Over the years, I recall strange stuff happening at Saratoga in the 80s or maybe 90s. One opening day, they just totally botched the placing. They literally didn't read the saddle cloth right and made official the wrong finish. They paid out wrong and if you had hit the race right, you were just plain old out of luck. I believe this was soon after they implemented the "quick official" instead of waiting for all the jockeys to weigh out and there was outcry about the "quick official" being a mistake. (for those who do not know, even after an uncontroversial race, you still had to wait for the jockeys to weigh out and it took what seemed like forever before you could cash your paper tickets).

two other crazy ones I recall off the top of my head -- a jockey with the same name as Kendrick Carmouche's dad (it could have been Kendrick Carmouche's dad -- dont know how to confirm it) -- was caught hiding in the fog. The track -- Jefferson Downs -- on the shores of Lake Ponchatrain -- was a bull ring with an unusual dog leg chute on the second turn -- sort of like what Keeneland uses for 4.5 furlong races -- but it was angled to the left instead of the to the right as you look at the diagram. They would run routes out of this stretch so that a mile and a sixteenth was still a 2 turn race (really like 2.25 turn) rather than a three turn race (like at CT). Anyway, the fog was coming in bad off Lake Ponchatrain and Sylvester just decided to wait in the chute while the other horses did a lap around the track, he rejoined them as they were coming into the stretch and won easy. It was apparently obvious his horse had not run the whole distance.

The other one, Andy Beyer wrote about in one of his early books. An American journalist was in the Dominican Republic covering what looked like might be a revolution. He went to the racetrack and they had the equivalent of a jackpot pick 6. An unsual sequence prevailed and he had the single ticket to take home the whole pool. However, the crowd got so angry about the seemingly illogical race results that a riot started at the track which ended up turning into the expected revolution and the track never paid out the wager. That might be the roughest bad beat story i have ever heard -- hitting a life changing wager and then not getting paid out because your ticket triggered a revolution that took down the government in the country.