Read All About it: Rags to Riches Takes the Belmont!!!, by Marion Altieri
June 11 , 2007
I'm feeling particularly proud as I write this tonight: my exacta box was on Rags to Riches and Curlin. I knew that, one way or another—those two Big Horses were going to tough it out, and share the 1-2.
Rags to Riches is one amazing filly. Let me rephrase that: she's one amazing horse.
The linguists may have to invent some new adjectives before this remarkably gifted girl is done racing—all the superlatives have already been used up, and she's just starting to show us what she can do.
Rags and Curlin battled it out down the stretch—and, a note here for the naysayers, those "commentators" and occasional turf writers who doubted that Curlin could even go a mile-and-a-half. I guess he could. He did. He's a monster horse whose career—I hope—is just starting.
(Please, God, don't let his connections take the money and run straight into the breeding shed. We need to see Curlin, Street Sense, Hard Spun and Rags to Riches in the Travers here in Saratoga in August. The Sport, itself, needs to see its heroes racing for as long as the horses are sound, and want to race. To take a great horse like Curlin—or any of them—off the track too early, in favor of the Big Breeding Bucks would be a sin of monumental proportion.
And you wonder why racing's administrators think they need casinos and splashwater kingdoms to bring people to America's racetracks. They still haven't caught on that keeping actual horses—Champion Thoroughbreds, like this herd—racing, and thrilling their fans—is the only thing that will help keep this Sport alive.)
I digress. Or do I? The fact is that, for the first time in 102 years, a filly has won the Belmont Stakes, the longest race in America. Of course this is a delight to Alpha Mare Media! But from a marketing perspective: this is an absolutely platinum opportunity to bring millions of hearts and minds into this magnificent endeavor, this singularly beautiful Sport.
The way to market the Sport is…and this seems o-so-obvious—to market the Sport of Thoroughbred Racing. That means that it's necessary to bring big, bright, strong, smart horses to the track, and give them their proverbial heads. The horses will tell us when they want to retire from running—and they don't make that decision based on the thrilling prospect of becoming broodmares or stallions.
So Rags to Riches must be kept in the game for as long as she wants to race, and enjoys her job. She became a Champion of monumental proportion today—not a "great broodmare prospect."
No doubt, Rags' victory will bring in new fans, simply because she did beat "the boys." Other, long-time race fans, may become Rags fanatics, because they've been won over. She will build her own stable of fans and admirers. Marketing the Sport from today on should be like shooting fish in a barrel: really, really easy. Ride the back of that filly all the way to full grandstands and bursting-at-the-seams mutuel windows.
(The recent past has seen many other potentially platinum moments at the capable hooves of great fillies and mares, moments which racing's administrators have pooh-poohed. They didn't realize the tremendous marketability of these horses, and that's just plain damn dumb. Maybe they were, truly, acting from some deep-seated need to perpetuate the myths about female Thoroughbreds. Maybe they're just stupid, and can't see a brilliant marketing opp when it's running at them at 45 mph. For example, I'm thinking of Azeri's 11 Grade 1 races in a row—which went almost completely unnoticed by the racing press. And if our own media, the racing "experts," don’t' take notice of such an accomplishment—why would we expect other, "regular" media to acknowledge it?)
So Rags achieved something spectacular: unfortunately, her triumph is noticed precisely because she is a filly. Hear me out: She's great. She's gifted. She's…a Thoroughbred. I'm living for the day—working my fingers off, writing my brains out, trying to hasten that day—when a filly racing against males, and kicking their big, fat, beautiful rumps—won't be noticed.
YES, it's absolutely wonderful that Rags to Riches won the Belmont. Were I at the media hotel in Garden City tonight, I'm sure I'd be dancing with abandon on a table with some photographer from Oshkosh. Go, Rags!
But the bottom line is that she won the Belmont Stakes because, simply put, she was the best horse out there. Not the best female horse out there (she was the only female there, of course)—but the best horse, period.
In a future Editorial, I'll write about the physiology of Thoroughbreds, and the fact that female Thoroughbreds are not, contrary to mistaken belief, physiologically, biologically or emotionally inferior to males. Rags to Riches is not a "freakish female," as goes the horribly insulting phrase. Azeri was not a "freak," nor were Regret, Genuine Risk, Ruffian or Busher.
Those great fillies and mares were great racehorses, period. Today at Belmont Park, a great Thoroughbred won the day. She will go on to prove herself over and again, and may even be named Horse of the Year (if the voters are smart).
But to say that a great female Thoroughbred won the Belmont is to do a disservice to Rags to Riches. It's not unusual, or odd, for a female Thoroughbred to be big, tough, smart and dangerous, anymore than it's unusual for a male Thoroughbred to be small, diminutive and unfocused. Horses have personalities, varying levels of drive and determination.
And that's not attributable to their gender, that's because they're living beings.
Rags to Riches has a new slew of fans tonight, and that's wonderful. Please give her all the adulation due a true Thoroughbred Champion. But to always qualify her victory by adding the adjective, "female" is to strip her of the victory, itself.
Let's give a great Champion her due: Rags Rocks. |
