Aunt Dot Dot at Timber Ridge Farm. She is in foal to Giacomo and due in late March.

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP)—Oaklawn Park is throwing $5 million at star females Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta to meet for the first time at the Apple Blossom in April.

The racetrack in Hot Springs announced Thursday that the owners of both champion horses are receptive to the idea. No firm commitments have been made.

“This is an event of a lifetime,” said Pat Pope, Oaklawn’s racing secretary. “We’re going to do everything to bring them to the state of Arkansas.”

Rachel Alexandra won 2009 Horse of the Year honors over Zenyatta. The 4-year-old Rachel and 6-year-old Zenyatta have never met on the track to settle who is the best.

Oaklawn said the $5 million purse will be offered only if both horses enter. If not, the purse will revert to $500,000 as initially planned.

No matter who is in the field, the Apple Blossom distance has been increased from 1 1/16 miles to 1 1/8 miles.

Rachel Alexandra is training at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. Her first race this year is undetermined. She went 8-0 last year, including the Preakness and two other wins against male horses.

Zenyatta had been off to retirement after capping a 14-0 career with a win in the Breeders’ Cup Classic. But now she’s back for another year and might run in the Santa Margarita Handicap at Santa Anita on March 13.

Zenyatta, who won the 2008 Apple Blossom, is owned by Jerry and Ann Moss, and trained by John Shirreffs. Rachel, who won twice at Oaklawn last year, is owned by Jess Jackson and Harold McCormick and trained by the nation’s top trainer Steve Asmussen.

“My family and I would love to see her run at Oaklawn Park. If she is in top form and it fits in our schedule, we will be there,” Jackson said. “As you have heard me say many times before, a number of factors must be considered when deciding where to race a horse—the number one factor being the condition of the horse. Rachel will tell us when she is ready to start her 2010 campaign and we humans must agree she is in top form.”

The voters got it right
Rachel Alexandra 130 to Zenyatta 99

The best news of the new year, of course, is that Zenyatta is running in '10. So the two great race mares will probably face off on a conventional dirt surface (should they remain sound). Wherever they run I will be there. It just might be the most anticipated race in the history of the sport in America.

As the field turns for home it is In the Woods. In the Woods comes off the turn and gets command. Down to the last furlong with In the Woods now striding clear to a 2 1/2 length lead. The Big Story has moved to second, trying to sustain that run. Deliver Results and Delivery Man are both down inside. They're in deep stretch and it is In the Woods. In the Woods clear by 2 1/2 with The Big Story second best. It will be In the Woods. In the Woods will be first under the wire.

Truxton Stables' In the Woods was best in a field of $7500N2L claimers to pick up $12,000 for the effort. Most importantly, after 16 months and 30 consecutive losing starts, a Truxton Stables' runner has found its way to the winner's circle.

Happy New Year! May this be the start of an excellent '10 and a decade of success.

A decade worth of betting

Great project.

Ugly.

$1,886 per start

Expected Wins: 3.78
Actual Wins: 0

Probability of losing all 24 starts: 1.27% 

My two favorite writers on Horse of the Year -

Andrew Beyer

Steven Crist

The Morning Telegraph was founded in 1833, more than 60 years before the Daily Racing Form. Both were bought by Moe Annenberg in the 1920s.

Excerpt from The First Century: Daily Racing Form Chronicles 100 Years of Thoroughbred Racing by Joe Hirsch (1996)

Daily Racing Form was America's racing newspaper in the Midwest and West, but in the East it had to share the market with The Morning Telegraph. Both were Annenberg publications; they shared common business, statistical and editorial staffs, but as a concession to the New York print unions they had separate press rooms in the same building. Perhaps because of tradition, The Morning Telegraph, with its broadsheet format, was more popular with the public. However, the Daily Racing Form, a tabloid, continued to be offered in the East until a decision was made to discontinue in 1951.

In a similar vein, The Morning Telegraph was briefly offered to the racing public in the Midwest and West during the 1950s. Its broadsheet mode, so popular in the East, was rejected by those to whom the tabloid size was the norm. Broadsheet remained the choice in the East until 1993.

In the 1950s, New York City was served by eight daily newspapers: the Times, Herald-Tribune, Daily News and Daily Mirror in the morning and the World-Telegram, the Sun, the Post and the Journal-American in the afternoon. One by one these papers closed, in part due to pressure from the International Typographical Union under the direction of Bert Powers.

Daily Racing management, seeking to avoid the kind of long, debilitating strikes that preceded the closing of the majority of New York's newspapers, purchased a piece of property in Hightstown, New Jersey, just off the New Jersey Turnpike. Midway between New York and Philadelphia, the property was just outside the jurisdiction of the New York ITU.

A modern newspaper plant was constructed, and it opened in November of 1971, just as talks were under way between The Morning Telegraph and the New York Typographical Union. The paper that was printed at the Hightstown plant was Daily Racing Form's first venture into 'cold type' and was sold in Mid-Atlantic locations while the New York office of The Morning Telegraph continued to print that paper.

Negotiations between the paper and the union were stalemated and going downhill in the spring of 1972. As the New York union called for strike, it was announced on April 1 that The Morning Telegraph would no longer be published and that the Hightstown office would henceforth print the Eastern edition of the Daily Racing Form, but in broadsheet mode with which readers of The Morning Telegraph were familiar.

The union reacted by throwing a picket line around the 52nd Street office, barring passage in and out of the building. Some union members also journeyed to Hightstown and attempted to picket there, but an injunction was obtained and the pickets were removed to a location from which they were no longer effective. Because ground transport of records and certain equipment was barred by the picket line in New York, essential items were taken to the roof of the building and removed by helicopter.

Maverick baseball owner Bill Veeck ran Suffolk Downs from 1969-1971 and documents his experience in Thirty Tons a Day: The Rough Riding Education of a Neophyte Racetrack Operator.  In his first year, Suffolk Downs ran the richest turf race in the history of American racing - the two mile, $200,000 added Yankee Gold Cup.

The race had created such interest around the country that ABC-TV had approached me indirectly about telecasting it live on Wide World of Sports, which would have meant a windfall income of something like $50,000. The catch was that they wanted me to delay the race for an hour so that it would fit into their programing. And that I wasn't going to do. I had instituted a policy of Precision Post, which meant that the races went off scrupulously on schedule, not when the last dollar was shoved through the betting windows - a radical departure at Suffolk Downs. I certainly wasn't going to throw it away on the big race of the year. Besides, television may run the world but it doesn't run me. There is, I think, a not-so-subtle difference between having the TV people point their cameras at your race - which is a form of reporting - and subjugating your race to their programing. When you accommodate yourself so docilely to their direction, your race becomes a TV show, your track is reduced to a backdrop, and your customers become props. "You want to telecast the race?" I told them. "Fine. But it's our race you'll have to telecast, not yours."

Jean-Pierre best thirteen others to win the Yankee Gold Cup in 3:19 4/5.