At the press conference yesterday, G.D. announced that one thing Kee will be doing that is not being done at WO is to display,on the toteboard,immediately after the race, the exact distance traveled by each horse. Perhaps I'm still smarting over the last at Bel this past Sat, but it's hard not to imagine, if & when the technology makes its way to NY, what those numbers are going to look like over the course of an entire meet/year for a certain very pleasant & extremely good looking distaff jockey who has been romantically linked in the racing press to the rider of the 2005 Derby winner.

The Trackus colored rectangles, which for some unknown reason are being called "chicklets", on the bottom WO simulcast feed seem to me underwhelming at best. Though not as much as advertised, they do help somewhat when you're trying to follow a horse in the middle or back of the pack, but look an awfully lot like colored versions of the squares which were used in the orginal pong game. Kee will also be showing those, though why someone at the track would be looking at colored squares on a televison instead of the horses right in front of them, is beyond me. However,Kee will also use the technology to create, on one panel of a massive, three panel,state-of-the-art video screen,larger than life animated versions of the horses. The images appear to be the same as the lifelike ones in the Sega video game "Derby Owners Club-World Edition."

All this plus a synthetic racing surface represents the biggest turnaround of any track, considering that back in the "good old days" they didn't have a turf course,a track announcer,or any exotics, unless you counted the early double on an 8 race card, all of which was marketed using the slogan "Racing As It Was Meant To Be." It's too early to know whether & to what extent these things will catch on elsewhere, but Kee's Oct meet might very well represent "Racing As It Is Going To Be."