Monday, November 17, 2008

Career Over? Call the Commissioner

Two intertwined stories this morning are out. One, the Canadian Press is reporting the following headline on its Somebeachsomewhere story: "Somebeachsomewhere Ends Career With Win at Sires Stakes" & two, there is a report out that the tracks have set up a task force to look at ways to pump stakes money to events for horses sired by horses five years of age or older.

The first story by the CP does say the following in the text:

Somebeachsomewhere ended his Canadian pacing career in style Saturday night, cruising to victory in the $300,000 Ontario Sires Stakes Super Final for three-year-old colt pacers.

But is the damage done with this headline? For a sport that gets so little fanfare we need people to know that he is racing this weekend don't you think? And that his career is not over. This is a job for a commissioner office. In other sports the office would be on the phone immediately and correcting something like this I imagine. I can pretty much guarantee that the NFL would be working the phones if a CP report said that a football stars career was over when he had two games to play.

The very good Equidaily.com, horse racing news aggregator with a large following picked up the story today and placed it under this headline on their site:

"Sulky side: Somebeachsomewhere ends career with win at Sires Stakes"

It is clearly not their fault. When I read a headline like that I think his career is over as well and would post it like that. This type of stuff seems to happen in harness racing all too often. I am sorry for the broken vinyl, but: We need a central office.

As for the harness tracks getting together to look at older stakes it is welcome news. Bloggers have been pushing this for some time now, and virtually everyone in our sport is wanting to see horses like the Beach race when they are 4. This is a step in the right direction. I applaud Mr. Gural and others. According to the release, many of their thoughts are what Bill Finley at ESPN spoke about here.

Super post with pictures of Somebeachsomewhere's race on Saturday at Woodbine on Down the Stretch.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another perfect example of this was TSN. Harness racing finally finds two minutes on sportsdesk, thanks to the Beach, but they too falsely dubbed the race the final of his career. An opprtunity to say something, anything, to the masses, but instead the story is left to be interpreted by the one group that was attending for the first time.
Commissioner! Exactly, it's the first step toward control. Control of the message, control of the product, control of the future.

Blaine said...

Shadow Play beats Somebeachsomewhere in the Breeders Crown 3yo Pace. You heard it here first.

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