A little bit of history

I got the most wonderful email earlier in the week from a woman who works at Suffolk Downs, the racetrack in MA that Lucy retired out of. Here's the email, which I am posting with Jess's permission:

Hi Kate,

A friend passed along your blog as she was sure I would find it of great interest and I did. I work at Suffolk Downs as the television personality and publicist and I remember your lovely filly very well. I always wondered what happened to her and I am so pleased to see that she wound up with someone like you - she looks phenomenal. I took home my first OTTB this past fall and he is the great love of my life.

Just wanted to say good work.

Jessica

This email put me on cloud 9 for a number of reasons:

1. How cool is it that my blog is out there and reaching people from Lucy's past?!
2. It is so awesome that Lucy was special enough even as a terrible racehorse, that Jess remembers her from two years ago! Just think about all the horses that pass through a racecourse.
3. Now I know a bit more about what she was like before I bought her!
4. It was so sweet of Jess to send me this email and I definitely blushed at all of her compliments!!

Jess and I emailed back and forth this week and one thing I asked her was if she was in touch with any of the jockeys who exercised her or rode her. To my delight, she emailed me yesterday to tell me that she had spoken with one of the jockeys who raced L, and the jockey "remembered her right away". She told Jess that you could never ride Lucy with a stick, because the more the jockey hit her to get her to run faster, the slower she went. I find this *hilarious* because "slow" is not a word I'd ever use to describe my horse, although compared to some of the very fast racehorses she was competing against, I can understand that she might be considered slow. But most of my time riding her has been spent trying to get her to slow down, not speed up, and I rarely carry a crop with her. If I do carry a crop I use it as a threat ("ok, you want to play it like that!? well check out my WEAPON!"). Good news is that I rarely EVER use it on her, but carrying it with me works as a little bit of motivation for her to behave (not like she ever really cares about consequences, as is demonstrated by her many naughty moments over the winter).

Anyway, very cool :D

Jess has told me she wants to be a resource of information for anyone whose horse raced at Suffolk, so if you have a Suffolk OTTB and want to find more info about your horse, let me know and I will put you in touch with her. She is very nice and very helpful!!

Here's a photo of Lucy from when she first came off the track. Her last race was just a few days before this photo was taken, and here she was being prepared to be sold to her first home.

Michael Gill: not a winner

There is a whole lot of talk going on about Michael Gill, an apparently infamous trainer based mostly out of Penn National Race Track. I thought his name sounded familiar and so I did a bit of research, and it turns out he owned Lucy before she was retired.

He is infamous and strongly disliked by the majority because of his poor record with horses dying under his care. It seems that perfectly sound, healthy, and successful race horses are bought by him and then the next thing you know, they're going 40mph down the back stretch on a broken leg. Apparently he has shipped significant amounts of horses directly to Canada on slaughter trucks from his farm, to avoid gaining unwanted attention by going through auctions.

Somehow Lucy managed to get out of there before she broke down and/or was shipped off to the slaughterhouse. Lucky girl.

Here's the COTH thread.

Here's where it says Lucy belonged to him.

Working on suppleness

Lucy has been consistently really hard to ride to the left. She doesn't really turn, she kind of moves sideways. At first I thought she was being resistant but after last night's ride it was clear that something is way off with her (I'd suspect a few ribs are out on the left side and maybe some SI issues are present, too) and turning to the left is physically uncomfortable for her, poor girl. This explains her tendency to rush going to the left, and that whole nose-to-the-outside thing that she does. The chiro is coming out on Monday so until then we will take it easy. During our ride last night, we did a ton of circles at the trot (I don't think I stayed on the rail for more than half the length of the indoor). Everything was circles, serpentines, "snowmans" as a girl at the barn called them (start with a big circle, go across the diagonal into a medium sized circle, go across the diagonal again into a small circle, and then weave backwards through the pattern until you have traced a snowman shape), and spirals. She seemed to do really well.

My new (used) saddle is arriving today and I am pretty excited!

Also, check out what arrived in the mail today! It's the win photo from Lucy's one and only victory in December of 2008 at Philadelphia Park:

My little claiming pony

I don't know where I heard that Lucy ran only five times, but it turns out that she actually ran fifteen times! I'm sure glad I got those x-rays!

Kenny did a bunch of sleuthing and every single race she ran was a claiming race. She raced at Suffolk, Philadelphia Park, Calder, and Penn National. She won one race at Philadephia Park on December 7, 2008, and the only other time she placed was a third. I got the idea of calling the Philly to see if I could get a copy of the winning photo and the photographer called me back and she was able to track down the image and they are sending me a copy! I am so excited.

I did a little YouTube search of her and came up with only one result, which was her second race. You don't even really see her run because she threw her jockey coming out of the starting gate. That's my girl!

You can see as she comes out of the starting gate she does this wild crop hop and off the jockey flies.

Here's the video.