Joe Hirsch Must Be Rotating By Now

The frequently insightful and entertaining Paulick Report is chuckling about a rather bad factual error in racing's paper of note, the Desert Valley Times of Southern Utah. Apparently, the DVT's racing columnist Duke Hunt has suggested the Haskell Invitational as a possible tete-a-tete for Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra in his latest column, leading Mr. Paulick to suspect that Joe Hirsch must be rolling in his grave.

Now, I can't help but think that Joe Hirsch would be more disappointed that with all the factual errors (to say nothing about leaps of logic) you'll find in an average edition of the DRF or Blood-Horse, the one turf writer Mr. Paulick slams is some retired former USAF sergeant who writes for a minor provincial paper on a hobby basis. Or the fact that Mr. Paulick ridicules this guy on a large racing website without even leaving a comment at the article itself.

For perspective, not to ridicule (no, really), I had already dug up some old fact-checking error from the Paulick Report's archives, remembering that one edition of Mr. Paulick's helpful "Saturday Stakes, Where to Watch" posts had listed the Florida Oaks, Tampa Bay Derby and Honeybee Stakes as turf races, one of them at the wrong time too. Happens to everybody, unless you have an excellent fact-checking department.

And then I decided to google the esteemed Desert Valley Times of Southern Utah (both for info and because it struck me as odd), and wouldn't you know: the Desert Valley Times is a twice-weekly paper from Mesquite, Nevada, right on the Nevada/ Arizona border. To be fair, the DVT is owned and distributed by St. George, Utah daily newspaper The Spectrum, but Mr. Hunt's column, which deals with racing topics and his local race book, is very obviously DVT-produced content.

Yes, sloppy fact-checking is a bitch.

I guess you just have to be lucky that no one notices such easily avoidable mistakes, or that they at least aren't such a dick to write about it on the net, be it on a well-visited aggregator/ news site or some obscure blog from Germany that has made its own share of factual blunders.

(Image of Secretariat winning the 1974 Breeders Cup Classic [source])

Back from Hibernation

I believe that sports, much like bears or squirrels, do much better if they allow themselves an annual period of rest and recovery (ask a panda!). Every fan knows that there are two outstanding days in any sport: opening day (when the whole season is ahead and everything is possible) and finals day (when a story that has been unfolding all season finds its conclusion).

Horseracing, with its global, diverse heritage and its rootedness in nature, does not allow for a true World Championship or a uniform opening date, but it evolved from regional, strictly seasonal circuits. Yet, with the notable exceptions of Hong Kong and Ontario, all major racing jurisdictions today refuse to even give their followers any time to rest and reflect.

In North America, the introduction of winter racing to Northern states and the simultaneous year-round expansion of Western and Southern circuits has pushed the sport into a downward spiral (in destroying season structures; economically; but even more in pioneering a destructive approach to business strategy) which the sport has never recovered from.

In Europe, it was only over the last one or two decades that "winter racing" was introduced and gradually expanded – enormous numbers of dirt or artificial surface races of little sporting value. The effects are more subtle, but essentially the same.

Racing fans therefore have to take their off-season breaks on their own, which I usually do from December to February. I went a step further this year by completely avoiding any racing media since early January (in Germany this is easily done by stopping outright effort to the contrary, you won't just stumble over racing updates). I was aided by the fact that we had a real winter for the first time in over a decade (or – in the words of the media – a "snow chaos"; because for the media on both sides of the Atlantic there is, apparently, absolutely no state in between "no snow" and "SNOW CHAOS – hide the kids and run – we're all gonna die --- and these goosebumps here prove that global warming is a sham made up by a billionaire scientist cabal out to destroy our defenseless mom-and-pop industrial corporations").

Anyway, my rather extreme Off-season seems to have worked, I don't think I've been this excited about starting into a season in years. After spending last evening re-watching "Seabiscuit" (The Movie) and "Seabiscuit" (the related PBS docu)*, I intend to spend much of this weekend reading up on TDN newsletters, Turf-Times newsletters and half a dozen blogs.

P.S.: I would have announced this blogs hibernation beforehand, but it was a slightly forced, spur-of-the-moment decision, and while I have received vastly different assessments about the size of my ego, it was in any case not large enough to dedicate a Raceday360 post entirely to such an announcement, particularly for a blog that's only updated once a month or so anyway.

* - On a sidenote: how can PBS, with its tiny, constantly-threatened budget continually produce better work in almost all fields of documentaries (history, science, art, social, nature) than either of Germany's two public broadcasting behemoths with their 7.2 billion € annual battle chest?** And does it make things better or worse that, with the exception of the BBC, every single one of Europe's giant national broadcasters can't even begin to challenge PBS in this field?

** - They're currently in the habit of just pretending they did. [As you can tell from the opening sentence] I bought the German-market DVD-Sets of PBS' superb "Evolution" series as well as the BBC's highly-acclaimed "Blue Planet" and "Planet Earth" series this winter, and in each case every episode ends with a "presented by ARD"-screen, as does every single BBC or PBS docu they broadcast on TV. It does not specifically mention that the ARD's involvement was limited to contributing the German-language audio track. I'm sure if they ever produce a German audio track for "Ken Burns Baseball", this one will be tagged as 'co-produced by Berlin-Brandenburg Broadcasting' too.

(Image: 1963 race at New Orleans' Fair Grounds Race Track in the snow; Source: the N.O. Public Library)

Lost In Translation

As fortunately as it is surprising, no one around here seems to be in the early stages of hysteria in anticipation of this week’s visit of the American Messiah-elect to our (really not that) humble town.

Unlike the prophets of old however, Obama is poised to block our way through the raging waters (or over them, for that matter), as the bridge I would usually take to my job will be closed for security reasons on Thursday.

Anyway, the reason I posted today is that Pull The Pocket has brought it to the blogosphere’s attention that Poker Channel Europe yesterday started to televise American racing in a daily hour-long show. PCE is an extremely remote digital channel available on a very limited number of cable systems, but one that can be viewed using Zattoo.

Poker and Racing, by the way, are a natural match. Both are the only two forms of gambling in which skill and determination can give you a winning percentage. Both are also the only ones in which the house (at least theoretically) can be neutral towards the result as long as the handle is high enough.

I was intrigued by the concept for a couple of minutes, even more so when I clicked the link on PCE’s website to get further information and realized that their program is actually presented and produced by Equi8, a relatively new and very promising German web channel/ADW which is for the most part a continuation/copy of defunct Premiere Win. P-Win was a German channel dedicated almost exlusively to American horse racing run by pay-per-view service Premiere, but it was actually available for free and streamed its entire program (6pm-2am weekdays, ca. 2pm-2am weekends) online.

It had its pitfalls, but nevertheless it was easily the best of several failed attempts at establishing a racing channel in Germany. One of its best features was a crew of really good commentators, ranging from longtime analysts to active jockeys and trainers.

After watching half an hour of the “Equi8 Happy Hour”’s lead-in program (virtual poker, no kidding) I was sure I knew what to expect, and that it wouldn’t be bad. After all, what could go wrong with a studio crew of longtime veteran Michael Luxenburger and Thorsten Castle, the track announcer at Munich Racecourse and a brilliant promoter at times (both are P-Win alumni)?

I was gonna find out soon enough: they were forced to moderate in English. Both aren’t bad at English, but both aren’t nearly good enough to go On Air speaking it, mainly because they have too detectable an accent and lack the easy slap-of-tongue they master in their native language. The program had a studio crew that can be a joy to listen to, and used it in a way that made listening to them an ordeal. That’s wasted talent, and a textbook case of offending two audiences by trying to be everything to everyone.

Let’s be honest for a second: how large does PCE assess the market in Cyprus, Croatia and Belgium to be? As long as they aren’t allowed to show it in the UK or Ireland, the market for this show is Germany. And if they would be allowed, they’d find out the hard way that no native speaker would listen to a bunch of accent-plagued Germans using mispronounced English to discuss American racing. If you assemble a team of some of the best German racing analysts, why not use that potential rather than have them struggle uncomfortably through moderations that end up lacking, or worse?

The Paulick Distort

Pull the Pocket has an interesting article on the all too close-knit relation between racing press and industry. From computer gaming to wine, from model rail roads to fashion, the problem that the special interest media is both too personally connected with and too financially dependent on the industry it covers to really take a critical point of view is one found in every area. What really caught my eye though was not the topic itself but one of the comments.

In it, web journalist and former Bloodhorse editor-in-chief Ray Paulick, mentioned in the article as having a considerable bias towards the interests of horsemen, pleads "guilty as charged", adding that "without the horsemen, there will be no horses" and that "we need to do more for fans and horsemen...if we do that successfully, the tracks will succeed".

There is good reason for the coziness between racing journalists and horsemen. Everyone who spent decades in the sport will have become friendly with a large number of horsemen, so on a personal level it's understandable that racing columnists wouldn't want them to get hurt. Also, with the possible exception of Andrew Beyer, no racing journalist has the standing not to risk his job when confronting the industry. Since the racing media is financed almost exclusively by industry advertising, who do you think they would ultimately side with in a standoff between horsemen and a columnist. Still, there is a difference between avoiding a losing battle and actively lobbying for the horsemen’s interests, especially where it conflicts with the interests of the sport (and fans).

Mr. Paulick's claim that not siding with the horsemen would leave the sport without horses is an oversimplification to the point where it becomes an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Is he actually proposing that the sport couldn't exist with a lower number of horses and race dates than we have now? How then does he explain the success of Hong Kong’s two race tracks, each running less than 10 races a week? Or the existence of successful tracks in South American countries, all of them with a much smaller pool of horses and horsemen than in the US.

Horse racing, after all, isn't a welfare system, it’s a professional sport/entertainment industry. Does Golf succeed because it sees to it that wannabe-pros who regularly miss the cut on the Northern Arizona tour still make enough income to give them a living? It doesn't. Horsemen are professionals just like actors or baseball players, which means that either they’re good enough to pay their dues or they’ll have to search for another profession. The interest of racing jurisdictions and the racing media should be the well-being of the sport, because that’s the one thing everything else ultimately depends on. In the long run, tracks succeed only when the sport succeeds, which won’t happen as long as it ignores the most basic rules of supply and demand in order to keep every horseman's boat afloat.