Reduction of Graded Races Leads to Grade-A Argument

The recent changes in the pattern of graded races for North America must have been good ones because no one is happy.

Understandably, no track operator wants to lose a Grade I rating for any of his races. Lennie Hale, vice president of the New York Racing Association, is on the board that grades the races, and he said last week that he was unhappy the panel had dropped six NYRA races from Grade I.

Hale was most unhappy about losing the top status for the Ladies Handicap, the ultimate filly-mare headliner.

From California, Chicago, Kentucky, Maryland and other areas, the gripes are coming in but nowhere are they louder than from Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.

In a full-page advertisement in the Saturday edition of the Daily Racing Form, Oaklawn Park president Charlie Cella explained “everything you always want to know about how THEY grade races but were afraid to ask.

“First, you determine how many horses were Eclipse Award winners or graded stakes winners. Disregard that information and instead divide the purse by the winning times of the last three or four winners. Convert that figure into kilometers, calculate the European logarithm and subtract the closing Dow Jones average. Divide by your age and publish the results. Any questions?”

Cella’s ad notes: “Take the 1989 Apple Blossom (Stakes at Oaklawn Park), a Grade I stakes. It had a field of six, including four graded stakes winners. The winner (Bayakoa) became the Eclipse Award winner and the second-place finisher (Goodbye Halo) became the Eclipse Award runner-up. And the result? THEY made it a Grade II!”

The racing people making the changes recognized that some would be angry, but they were told to reduce the number of Grade I races so that there would be fewer Grade I events than Grade II and there would be fewer Grade II races than Grade III.

If the Pimlico Special had not been upgraded to Grade I, more complaints probably would have come from the Laurel-Pimlico management about the Selima Stakes and Laurel Futurity, which were dropped from Grade II to Grade III.

A surprise was that the Daily Racing Form ran Cella’s ad. In earlier years, as a sort of house organ for the industry, it would not have been allowed to run such an obvious attack at leaders of the sport.

With Rupert Murdoch as the owner, it ran as Cella wanted it.

There has been no announcement of the dates for the 1990 Budweiser International.

But an ad on a racing calendar published in England and distributed in various racing centers indicates the International Turf Festival, of which the International is a part, will be run Oct. 20-21.

That is a week before the $10 million Breeders’ Cup Series to be run at Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y.

Jockey Julie Krone’s broken left arm is not healing well, according to the New York Daily News. Instead of returning to ride by early March, she may be out until June.

Krone broke her arm Nov. 24 in a spill at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J.

“I’m just not healing,” she told the News. “The doctor took an X-ray the other day and said it looked exactly like the one he took after the injury.”

Doctors will try electronic stimulation. It that succeeds, she might be back by April.

Grand Canyon was the leading vote-getter in individual balloting for the Eclipse Award for the top 2-year-old of 1989 but wound up as the runner-up to Rhythm.

The colt trained by Wayne Lukas got 84 votes compared with 82 for Rhythm. But he didn’t win in any one of the three bloc votes: the nation’s racing secretaries, the executives and racing experts for the Daily Racing Form and members of the National Turf Writers Association. Rhythm was first with the Daily Racing Form and the racing secretaries. The Turf Writers voted for Summer Squall. Grand Canyon was second with all three blocs.

That makes Rhythm the Rutherford B. Hayes of the 2-year-old set.