Zardana wears down Rachel Alexandra to win the New Orleans Ladies Stakes at Fair Grounds
A previous post here on BugBoy.net was written as if Zenyatta had already won horse of the year honors. The headline reads “Zenyatta wins Breeder’s Cup Classic”
Emotions sometimes get the best of sports fans and captivated by Zenyatta’s spectacular victory in the BC Classic. She beat a nice group of males to become the first female ever to win the Classic and feel she was every bit deserving in spite of Rachel’s stunning victories.
The Eclipse awards has a history of being conventional so it may be just coincidence but Rachel’s victories were unconventional over a conventional surface. Zenyatta’s victories were unconventional over an unconventional track.
They may meet sometime this year and if they do it’ll be good for racing.
However, it may never happen because after watching Rachel Alexandra race in the New Orleans Ladies Stakes, a race that was written in the racing books for her, will go down as many of the more recent previous horse of the year recipients to have gone down in defeat in their returning race after the award ceremony.
We witnessed the race live from Fair Grounds race course and have pictures of the race as Zardana wore down the defending 2009 Horse of the Year, Rachel Alexandra, and we hate to say we told you so but Zenyatta is a MONSTER MOM who defeated a much better group of older males in the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in ’09.
Jess Jackson will probably spend the next year avoiding Zenyatta rather than risk having her be defeated by a superior broodmare which is the way Calvin Borel explained his understanding from conversations he had with the connections of Rachel Alexandra.
Nevertheless, she is a nice young horse who will go on to win many more races in her career as she develops to earn her way into the record books. In 2009 she went undefeated by beating the once in a lifetime Mine that Bird upset of the Kentucky Derby — a race won because the jockey was better then everyone else under the conditions.
Her biggest win was at Saratoga which sealed the deal on Horse of the Year and befitting of a dramatic return in New Orleans we congratulate Jess Jackson, Steve Asmussen and most importantly Calvin Borel who may be sitting on his third winner real soon.
Somehow it all makes sense why we waited to write this post.
Tags: Horse of the Year, rachel alexandra, zardana, zenyatt