racingmeridian.com

Oh, no, girlfriend, no you don’t! No you don’t spend a year galloping around a plastic track against the same tired foes and then, on the basis of a win over two turfers, get to call yourself Horse of the Year. No. You. Don’t.

Bring that sacred cow east. Bring her to the dirt.

Bring her to Rachel Alexandra.

It is the race the horse racing world craves, needs, demands. Move heaven earth and the sacred bones of Secretariat, but make this race happen.

Bring that California giant out to Belmont and put her on a track with Rachel. Then give me fists full of money and let hot blood pour through my black gamblers heart. I’ll pound the tills till wood splinters and the god’s in heaven spill sheer electricity into my rapacious soul.

Give me this race.

I can’t stand the disgrace of this moment. The sheer cowardice of her connections in refusing her the right to leave California. The mendacity and ill spirit that allows an animal to live on the cool, bland indifference of modern synthetics, and then ask for glory in spite of their abominable and wretched ignorance of history.

Give me Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra at Churchill. In the snow of Aqueduct. Through the broken concrete and cobwebs of blessed Hialeah. Somewhere, anywhere. A mile and an eighth at Fort Erie or a mile and a quarter through the humidity of Gulfstream.

Get her off the coarse refuse of the modern age and onto a dirt track.

Let her get a good look at Rachel Alexandra’s lush rump and marvel as it leaves her gasping and resolutely behind.

Zenyatta can handle a synthetic course. The majority of great runners cannot. Horses are bred to run on dirt and grass. If I had a filthy dung covered donkey with an ability to run over the broken shards of beer bottles I’d have an amusement and a conversation piece. I wouldn’t have a champion.

Zenyatta has everything left to prove. Everything. The track was littered yesterday with genuinely great competitors who couldn’t begin to develop an understanding on how to navigate the surface. The fan is the one left bereft at the mockery and sacrilege that constituted main track racing at yesterdays Cup.

It is not enough to agree a Breeders Cup should never be run on synthetics again.

These tracks, these hideous distortions, need to be swept into the dustbin of history.