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Lazarus N supplemented to Canadian Pacing Derby Back to Home page Lazarus N and driver Yannick Gingras winning the Dan Patch Stakes MILTON, ON - August 20, 2018 - The deadline for supplements to this year's Canadian Pacing Derby and Maple Leaf Trot was Monday morning and the Woodbine Race Office received payments from the connections of Lazarus N and Dancer Hall. A $40,000 payment was required to supplement to the Canadian Pacing Derby or Maple Leaf Trot. "The Wonder from Down Under" Lazarus N will be making his second start on North American soil in the Canadian Pacing Derby. The six-year-old stallion won his U.S. debut on August 10 at Hoosier Park in the $325,000 Dan Patch. Earlier this year, Lazarus N was purchased by Taylor Made Stallion and brought to North America with eyes on the top races for older pacers and a potential World Record. The son of Bettors Delight, out of Christian Cullen mare Bethany, dominated the racing scene Down Under, winning 35 of 45 starts and earning $2.6 million prior to being purchased. Lazarus N races for Hall of Fame trainer Jimmy Takter. Dancer Hall has been a breakout star this season at Woodbine Mohawk Park and now the four-year-old will get the opportunity to take on the sport's best in the Maple Leaf Trot. A son of Deweycheatumnhowe, Dancer Hall has won seven of his last 10 starts heading into the Maple Leaf Trot. His most recent victory was 4 3/4 lengths score in the $75,000 Earl Rowe Invitational on Sunday evening at Georgian Downs.The Paul Reid trainee has been starring in the Woodbine Preferred this summer, having posted four wins and three runner-up finishes in seven Preferred starts. Dancer Hall is eight for 13 this season with $173,500 earned for owners 1187422 Ontario Inc. of Ottawa. His career numbers currently sit at 16 wins and $273,150 earned. Entries for this year's Canadian Pacing Derby and Maple Leaf Trot are due Tuesday morning at 10:30 a.m. If necessary, eliminations for both events will be contested this Saturday (August 25) at Woodbine Mohawk P

Sounds like both parties are happy seller and buyer...thats what it normally takes to get a successful sale....

Messara Report to be released Australian racing expert John Messara’s report reviewing the New Zealand racing industry will be released at a public meeting next week. The Arrowfield Stud chairman and former Racing Australia and Racing New South Wales chairman was given the task of reviewing the industry by New Zealand Racing Minister Winston Peters earlier this year. Peters has invited all interested members of the New Zealand racing industry to the public meeting, at 6pm on Thursday August 30 at Claudelands Conference Centre in Hamilton, to hear Messara’s findings. Peters will deliver a speech followed by a question and answer session from the floor. Please RSVP to [email protected] by 5pm Tuesday August 28, 2018.

Great old pics and what a legend Peter Wolfendon was...

Thanks Peter for the big effort... mistakes are easily corrected...not a big issue on here...cheers.

Thats sad Pam that they were lost to the industry...its happening far to much these days.

Hall of Fame jockey Victor Espinoza, his body broken by one fateful fall, is holding on for dear life This ad will end in 6 seconds ADVERTISEMENT Triple Crown-winning jockey Victor Espinoza fractured his C3 vertebrae in a training accident at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in July. The Hall of Fame jockey is riding a hard-back dining room chair, the only one in his house his broken body can navigate. His weakened hands are clutching invisible reins, grabbing at the air, again and again. His head is motionless because of a neck brace, but his eyes are moving, filling, brimming with tears. “One minute, I’m winning the Triple Crown,’’ Victor Espinoza says softly. “The next minute, I can’t feed myself.’’ The spacious Del Mar home is quiet. The room with the shiny silver trophies is darkened. A mechanical horse no longer creaks. This is a peek beyond the silk. This is the other side of the roses. This is where the ride ends, and reality begins. On a July Sunday morning at the famed seaside Del Mar race track, Espinoza was riding Bobby Abu Dhabi in a workout when their worlds literally disappeared from underneath them. Bobby Abu Dhabi suddenly collapsed of an apparent heart attack. Espinoza suddenly found himself riding on air. The giant horse immediately died. The 5-foot-1, 112-pound man flew into the dirt and broke his neck. Victor Espinoza smiles as he crosses the wire first in the San Pasqual Stakes at Santa Anita Park on Feb. 3 in Arcadia. (Alex Evers / Getty Images) Triple Crown-winning jockey Victor Espinoza works on coordination drills during a physical therapy session at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) Espinoza was initially paralyzed. He has since regained feeling in everything except his left arm, yet his mobility is greatly limited and his muscles are wracked with uncertainty. He requires a 24-hour caregiver to help him get out of bed, dress and bathe. He can walk, but not always steadily. He can feed himself, but slowly, and mostly with one hand. He is getting stronger every day, but remains confined to the neck brace and experiences occasional bouts of searing pain. “Your body has to reset itself, to learn how to do everything all over again,’’ says Espinoza, 46. “It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He plans on riding again but says he can’t even think about it right now. He spends his days away from the track where he once won seven races in one day, fighting through the isolation of physical therapy and mental frustration. “What happened to Victor is the thing we fear the most,’’ says fellow Hall of Fame jockey Gary Stevens, who has visited Espinoza. “A spinal injury. Somebody who might not be returning to the saddle. It’s a real eye-opener.’’ That fear lives daily with Espinoza, and he discussed it openly in a recent 90-minute interview in his home. The usually clean-shaven athlete, once glamorous enough to appear on “Dancing With The Stars,’’ was sporting a scraggly goatee because he cannot shave. His hair is growing long because he cannot remove his neck brace for a trim. He spent most of the interview sitting in that hard-back chair, but at the end of the conversation, he summoned caregiver Rosie Aponte to accompany him on a slow trek up a set of stairs to a glistening souvenir sitting in a glass case. Victor Espinoza has been doing physical therapy sessions since he fractured his C3 vertebrae in a training accident at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in July (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) He wanted to show his visitor the brown leather and black-cushioned saddle that he used to ride American Pharoah to victory in the 2015 Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes, resulting in racing’s first Triple Crown winner in 37 years. “I was once a champion,’’ he says. “But when we ride the horses, there is a reason we are followed by an ambulance.’’ :: To outsiders, it sounds absurd, this idea that a legendary jockey would climb out of bed on a Sunday morning to ride a horse for practice, for free. Why on earth would a guy like Espinoza, who has been aboard winners in seven Triple Crown races, with more than 3,300 career victories, do that? Turns out, it’s part of the game. Trainers value a jockey’s input on certain stakes horses, and if those jockeys value their mounts, they will come when called. “That’s part of our job; that’s just what we do,’’ Espinoza says, and so on that third Sunday in July, he hustled across the highway to work out Bobby Abu Dhabi as a favor to trainer Peter Miller. Espinoza had ridden the 4-year-old in his previous four races, twice finishing first, and was going to race in the following weekend’s Bing Crosby Stakes. When he saddled Bobby Abu Dhabi that morning, he hugged him like an old friend and whispered into his mane. “You take care of me, I take care of you.’’ It is the same thing he whispers to all of the horses he rides, horses with whom he believes he shares a heart. Since riding everything from donkeys to sheep to bulls while growing up as the 11th of 12 children on a farm in Hidalgo, Mexico, he has shared this feeling with everything he has saddled. He so badly wanted to ride horses for a living, he paid for jockey school by driving a bus in Mexico City. Today he still views his job as a privilege, and his role as a caretaker. Victor Espinoza works with occupational therapist Lily Guerrero during a physical therapy session. (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) “They’re like humans. It’s my job to take care of them. It’s just me and the horse; only us, together,’’ he says. “The horses know. They have confidence in me. They know I will never let anything bad happen to them.’’ But then, several long strides before the finish line at the end of that Sunday morning workout, the bottom dropped out. “My horse disappeared from under me,’’ Espinoza says. “Gone. Just like that. Gone.’’ Espinoza has twice broken his hand and arm from falls, but both times he had a few seconds of warning from a stumbling. Not this time. This horse didn’t stumble, it crumbled. “In 30 years of training, I’ve never had one fall like that,’’ Miller said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.’’ Espinoza never saw the horse again. He crashed into the track and wound up on his back, covered in dirt, unable to brush it off. “I couldn’t feel anything; the paramedics even had to get the dirt off my face,’’ he recalls. “Then I saw the look in their eyes and I said, ‘Oh no.’’’ His mind flashed to memories of paralyzed jockeys visiting the backstretch. He thought of another Triple Crown jockey, Ron Turcotte, the rider of the great Secretariat who is a paraplegic after being injured in a fall in 1978. “I thought, I’m being paralyzed. My mind is going crazy, thinking a lot of crazy things,’’ he says. “In my mind I see all the wheelchairs around the barns. I was so scared. I saw was like, why does this happen to me?’’ After all, it is Espinoza who is usually helping the afflicted, as he donates 10 percent of his winnings to City of Hope. It is Espinoza who seemed invincible in winning a remarkable five out of six Triple Crown races in 2014 and 2015. Victor Espinoza walks stairs during a physical therapy session with the help of physical therapist Christina Dinh. (K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune) “He’s a big-race rider,’’ Miller said. “He’s got ice water in his veins.’’ On that Sunday morning last month, Espinoza simply prayed for feeling in his limbs. He got it back, slowly, the right leg coming to life in the ambulance, the left leg moving at the Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where he was diagnosed with a fracture of his c3 vertebrae in his neck. He still couldn’t move his left arm. Doctors initially thought he had suffered a stroke. A day later, as he was being fed vanilla pudding, it finally sunk in, and he began to cry. “I thought, I ride all these horses like it was nothing, and now look at me,’’ he says. He also began mourning the loss of Bobby Abu Dhabi, his teammate who was gone before he knew it. “I cannot save that horse, and I cry for that,’’ Espinoza says. “I sat on that powerful animal, felt its speed, such a beautiful thing, and it falls, and I couldn’t do anything to help it, and that hurts.’’ During his third of 12 days in a hospital and rehabilitation center, his attitude began to brighten when the first trainer visited him. It was — who else? — Bob Baffert. It was Baffert who worked with Espinoza as American Pharoah’s trainer. It was Baffert who wanted Espinoza to know how much his bravery was appreciated. “We forget these jockeys are laying their lives on the line for us every day,’’ Baffert said. “There is nothing worse when you see something happen to them. All the fun and excitement ends. It changes the way you look at everything.’’ Espinoza hopes his story can change the way the world looks at jockeys, and understand how quickly they can go from the winner’s circle to the arms of a caregiver helping them get out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. “Our lives, our dangers, they are real; they are no joke,’’ he says. “People should know, this is what we risk every time we get on a horse.’’ The interview complete, Espinoza graciously stands up and begins slowly walking his visitor toward the front door. He passes walls of beautifully framed memorabilia, championship silks and photos everywhere. He can’t turn his neck to see them. He keeps walking as if they aren’t even there.

So in your opinion has it worked or has it made it worse???It looked shocking yesterday,JMO

Just wondering what everyone thinks of the Te Rapa track it looked pretty ordinary yesterday and seems to be getting worse despite the money that was spent on it...who is the caretaker there now??? Thoughts.

I think he is just having a dig.... I wish i was there too.....

Geez i remember him when I was a kid when looking back now he was one amazing superstar....incredible.

Do you know of any nice young types for lease from any of the farms... I may want to look at setting up a RC syndicate or racing club...it might be fun.

Any updates on how Dexter went in the USA???

Thanks Harewood I will check with PJ....cheers...geez you harness guys go well at the tipping caper....