An unsettling Breeders' Cup
I handled the most recent Breeders Cup in the following manner. I handicapped the races the day before. There went 35 minutes. As mentioned previously in this space, I'm not so good at picking the winners of Breeders Cup races, the problem being that there are too many horses that take the track at same time. My specialty is something like a six-horse $3,000 claiming field that goes in the mud at Charles Town. Too many good horses on a screen make me nervous. I have an eye for horses that don't seem to be quite as lame as they might have been the last time out. Supplementary entries on Breeders Cup day are automatic wagers because anybody willing to bet that much on his or her own horse is good by me. Kentucky Derby day and Breeders Cup day at the simulcast venue are like New Years Eve at your favorite bar - all the amateurs come out and get in the way. The plan was to take a fistful of dollars to the betting windows bright and early before the suckers get there, buy some tickets, then go home and watch the horse races in the comfort of my living room. This seemed to be working very well. And then race number one came on my television screen. My first thought was that perhaps I had consumed too much beer. But I was drinking a diet soft drink at the time. The most recent Breeders Cup was televised by NBC. Horse racing coverage on television probably tends to seem pretty standard to most observers because there are only so many places you can usually get a camera - on the press box and on a jockey's head. And there are only so many places a horse can run. And there is one place a horse usually finishes. So as a rule in something as relatively standardized as horse racing, the people make the show. It's like reading a newspaper. You don't so much read it for the news anymore, as you read it to see how certain individuals interpreted the news. My favorite part of all televised horse racing is the Budweiser Long Shot, which seems to come in once every other year. Just because I write here does not mean that I am obligated to love ESPN horse racing coverage on television and hate all else. Though it probably wouldn't be a bad idea in terms of career advancement. But this is an objective opinion of what amounts to a competitor, and if that's not the truth, my next 30-1 shot winner should be dq'd and placed last. During the Breeders Cup races, NBC decided to use for its homestretch coverage a camera that moved along side the horses on what seemed to be a track of some type. And I have a pretty good guess where NBC got this camera. From a garbage bin behind an NBA arena. This sliding-type coverage was tried on some basketball games, with the camera attempting to race along with a player during a fast break. Then evidently basketball fans began feeling queasy and throwing up in living rooms across America and the system was pretty much junked until it was tried on the ponies. I don't know the medical terminology behind motion sickness. But the concept seems pretty simple. When you try to record one thing moving very quickly, using a camera moving extremely fast in its own right, these actions can cause a reaction that goes in an air sick bag. It was like trying to watch the 'Blair Witch Project' while on horseback. For some odd scientific reason, the running-sliding-tracking-barf-bag-cam seems to work very well on foot races involving humans. As runners spin out of the turn, this camera seems to be able to maintain a more even pace than is the case with a basketball game or a horse race when there is coming and going and ebbing and flowing and shifting. During one Breeders Cup race, I found myself standing in the middle of my living room some five feet from the television as the sliding camera made up some ground to come from off the pace of the front-running horse. The track-cam finally got about even with the lead horse and stayed there as we all seemed to surge and swim toward a finish line that appeared to be bobbing in its own right. As everybody hit the wire, it was as though I was trying to stay on a raft that was adrift in the North Atlantic. I love new things in sports. Sign me up for the hot pink puck. The yellow first-down line in football is great. The baseball catcher cam and NFL referee cam and NASCAR bumper car cam are fantastic. But this sliding camera at the horse races, come on people, nobody needs for a room to start spinning in the middle of the day.
