Friday sees the Group 2 Balanchine at Meydan for the fillies and mares. Just five go to post and having run down one Godolphin hotpot in last month’s Cape Verdi, CHOISYA bids to repeat by defeating the 1/3 shot CINDERELLA’S DREAM who ran in America as a 3-y-o and ended up second in the Filly & Mare Turf at the Breeders Cup. That was over 2200m however and this is 1800m but we know CINDERELLA’S DREAM loves tight left hand ovals and firm turf. I’m just not convinced this is her trip and I prefer the proven course specialist CHOISYA who looks a tempting bet at 9/2. Oddly enough, I can’t see Buick or Godolphin represented at all at tomorrow’s Saudi Cup meeting at Riyadh. The Group 2 Sprint on the Dirt over 1200m looks the usual standoff between the Japanese, the Americans and the locals. Breeders Cup Sprint winner STRAIGHT NO CHASER has an obvious chance if ready after a near four month layoff. The Japanese have a powerful challenge but none of their really good sprinters - GABBY’S SISTER looks the best of them. The Group 2 Turf Cup goes for just under £1 million but no Coolmore or Godolphin runners. If you could take the form of his close second in the Eclipse at Sandown literally, AL RIFFA has a huge chance but all his form is on soft turf and he was well beaten in the Arc last time.  To be fair, he was one place in front of SHIN EMPEROR but we know the Japanese horses love firm turf and SHIN EMPEROR ran third in the Irish Champion and second in the Japan Cup which is serious form and looks too good for this lot if he brings his form to this race. CALIF was sixth in the Hong Kong Cup and with ROMANTIC WARRIOR in another race on this card, he has place prospects. This isn’t a strong field for the race and I think SHIN EMPEROR will take a lot of beating. The Group 2 Turf Sprint over 1200m has runners from Japan, America and Britain up against the locals in a 13-strong field. ASCOLI PICENO was favourite for the Golden Eagle at Rosehill last November on the same day as TEN HAPPY ROSE was running fourth in the Breeders Cup Mile - racing is a global sport these days. I quite like TEN HAPPY ROSE who only faded close home at Del Mar and showed plenty of tactical speed. The British challenge is arguably headed by TASK FORCE from the Varian yard who was seventh in last year’s 2000 Guineas but he didn’t really build on that in runs over 1400m  ANNAF won this last year but was well beaten in the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee at Ascot and had a decent if uninspiring pipeopener at Lingfield three weeks ago. I’ll be surprised if he can repeat in what looks a stronger renewal. Of the locals, MALYAN, an ex Roger Varian gelding, looks the best and you can never rule them out on their home turf. The 3000m Group 2 handicap always draws some decent European stayers. CONTINUOUS runs for Coolmore but his triumph in the English Leger seems a lifetime ago. GREGORY has had the misfortune of coming up against the likes of KYPRIOS and VAUBAN but it’s interesting to see the Gosden team put on the blinkers which is rare for one of theirs, The thing about first time blinkers, you never know, he could improve 10 lbs, go backwards or they may have no effect at all. They put blinkers on DEIRA MILE in last year’s Leger and he ran a decent fourth which is where he had finished in the Derby. The form alone entitles him to plenty of respect though I’m not sure the track will be ideal and he probably needs a strong end to end gallop. There are too many ifs, buts and maybes in this race so DEIRA MILE is a tentative selection at best. The feature Saudi Cup carries a first prize of £8 million making it the world’s richest race - about twice the value of the Arc and ten times the value of the Kiwi. The pot has drawn some serious contenders for all the American challenge has been diminished by injury, ROMANTIC WARRIOR is a superstar in Hong Kong but he’s done it elsewhere notably in the Yasuda Kinen In Tokyo last summer and the Jebel Hatta at Meydan last time. That was on turf, this is Dirt and as we saw with CITY OF TROY at Del Mar, the change in surface can be crucial. ROMANTIC WARRIOR’s connections have been honest - he can run on the Dirt but the kickback is the issue - will he face it? For those of us trying to punt on the race, that’s a huge question. The safer option is probably FOREVER YOUNG who was third in the Breeders Cup Classic and beat WILSON TESORO in the Daishotten at the end of last year,  RATTLE N ROLL was very good in the qualifier over course and distance and I can see him in the places. Another to consider is WALK OF STARS who won the Al Maktoum Challenge at Meydan last time.    

Brendan Walsh trainees Somethinabouther and Salt depart from the balmy South Florida weather in search of Kentucky Oaks (G1) points in the Feb. 21 Cincinnati Trophy Stakes at Turfway Park.View the full article

For the first time in the United States since data has been recorded, the racing-related fatality rate for the majority of U.S. races—specifically tracks under the oversight of HISA—fell below 1.00 per 1,000 starts for a calendar year in 2024.View the full article

Commissioner John Carvelli, who was appointed to the CHRB in August 2024, resigned from his position, CHRB executive director Scott Chaney acknowledged during the Feb. 20 meeting. Chaney said the resignation came "about 10 days ago."View the full article

Though three Japanese-trained 3-year-olds traveled to Saudi Arabia to compete Feb. 22 in the $1.5 million Saudi Derby (G3), a cast of 10 promising 3-year-olds remained behind in Japan to contest the Feb. 23 Hyacinth Stakes at Tokyo Racecourse.View the full article

Ellerslie R5 - 1, 5, 15 R6- 3, 4, 6 R7- 1, 5, 7 R8 - 1, 2, 6 Rosehill R2  2, 6, 11 R6 - 2, 3, 10  BB R8- 1, 3, 4  BB Caulfield R7- 1, 2, 3 R9 - 2, 7, 15

Sky screened one game a week live but I think others got on board and sorted the club and Heartland comp coverage so it can be done, just no good sitting back and blaming Sky for everything. As for Cricket it ain't helping itself with saturation of the calandar of 20 20 meaningless crap, after a while people lose interest.

It's too late Mike. In my household, interest in NZ cricket has waned considerably and our cricket viewing over the Xmas period consisted of the Aussie-India Test series (surely one of the best Test series ever) and the Aussie Big Bash comp. Re Heartland. They tried to cut Grassroots Heartland Rugby in 2024, but there was a stink and somehow they brought it back. There is a real strong following for that down in provinces. People love it because it harks back to a bygone age. It's very well done, especially the highlighting of the veterans and volunteers at the various clubs.

Don't worry Lee, I've been looking in on occasion, to read the profound views of some of the greatest intellectual minds in NZ, as posted on Race Cafe's Main Street. I found i couldn't post, so had to change servers in order to have my say... and I needed to have my say, because what a month it's been. As good as I could have hoped. President Trump has threatened to annex the Panama Canal from Panama; Greenland from Denmark; Gaza from the Palestinians and appears fairly serious about Canada being the 51st US state. In addition, he is blaming Ukraine for starting the Russia-Ukraine war, (despite what we all saw with our own eyes back in Feb 2022) and throwing them to the wolves.  He has made a news reporter and domestic violence perpetrator, Head of the Pentagon and a loony, who killed babies in Samoa by way of his false messaging, Head of US Health. I watch Fox News and Republican Senators falling over themselves to justify and support his utterances. Gutless, the lot of them!! I'm confident it will soon get even better Lee, so you'll be hearing from me for sure. UH

1. Ellerslie R5        1, 2, 15 BB 2. Ellerslie R6        2, 4, 6 3. Ellerslie R7        1, 7, 8 4. Ellerslie R8        1, 2, 6 5. Rosehill R2       2, 7, 11 6. Rosehill R6       1, 2, 10 7. Rosehill  R8      1, 4, 11 BB 8. Caulfield R7      1, 2, 4 9. Caulfield R8      1, 14, 15 10. Caulfield R9    2, 5, 15 Thanks Say No More and Scooby.

1. Ellerslie R5        1, 11, 15 BB 2. Ellerslie R6        1, 6, 14 3. Ellerslie R7        5, 7, 8 4. Ellerslie R8        2, 6, 7 5. Rosehill R2       3, 7, 11 6. Rosehill R6       1, 2, 3 7. Rosehill  R8      1, 7, 11 8. Caulfield R7      1, 2, 10 BB 9. Caulfield R8      1, 4, 8 10. Caulfield R9    2, 15, 16  Thanks John and Scooby. At the finish line on Saturday night, I think that the field will be well spread out.

Beautiful day forecast for Otaki tomorrow. Blue sky; Warm 21C, slight breeze; great sole of grass; Good 4; some give in the track - will suit all those Group One horses we so rarely get to see down this way. Problem is... we'll be watching them on the TV. Another Group race at Ellerslie. It becomes a bit of a 'same old same old' procession after a while.

Parx Racing in partnership with the Pennsylvania Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association are announcing the addition of Feb. 27 to their 2025 live racing calendar. The first post will occur at 12:05 p.m. ET.View the full article

No surprise, TVNZ ain't renewing any of sparks conquests and Sky more than likely dictate terms through no competition, but interestingly this deal is for Black Caps and White ferns home games, not domestic, no doubt Rugby will more than likely be just Super Rugby and All Black's, NPC and Heartland may be cut in the next deal  

Trumps 13 biggest lies of his first month back in office…   No change here then….   The tale of the $50 million – no, make it $100 million – in condoms for Hamas: When press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her first official White House briefing that Trump had thwarted a plan to spend $50 million “to fund condoms in Gaza,” it was immediately clear the claim was highly dubious; the Trump administration had no evidence to substantiate it. But Trump not only repeated the $50 million figure the next day, he added an incendiary claim that the condoms were “for Hamas.” Then, days after it had become obvious the $50 million figure was pure fiction, he inflated it to “$100 million. This was another example of Trumpflation – the president’s years-old habit of making his inaccurate stories more and more inaccurate over time. Blaming Ukraine for starting the war on Ukraine: Russia started the war in Ukraine when it invaded Ukraine in 2022. That is an obvious fact. But on Tuesday, when Trump dismissed Ukrainians’ complaints about their exclusion from US-Russia negotiations about ending the war, he falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war – saying, “You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal.” Laughable Kremlin-style propaganda, this time from the president of the United States. The (non-)uniqueness of birthright citizenship: Trump offered what might have sounded like a reasonable rationale for his attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship. The United States, he said, is the only country that has birthright citizenship. Except that is not true, as CNN and other outlets pointed out when Trump made the same claim as president in 2018 and on various other occasions. Dozens of countries, including Canada and Mexico, also grant automatic citizenship to people born on their soil. More up-is-down reversing of the reality of January 6: For years now, Trump has presented a version of the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. When he was asked in early February why he granted pardons to people who assaulted first responders, he said the people he pardoned were actually “assaulted by our government” and that “they didn’t assault.” This “they didn’t assault” claim was a brazen denial of the obvious truth, clear in video after video and trial after trial. The Justice Department has said more than 140 officers were assaulted on January 6, and that more than 170 people pleaded guilty to such assaults. A gusher of deceit about California water policy: Amid disaster, more dishonesty. First, Trump linked the Los Angeles wildfires to California’s decision to use some of its water to protect a fish species in the northern part of the state – even though the two things have nothing to do with each other, as befuddled experts explained to anyone who would listen. Then, after ordering the sudden release of billions of gallons of water from Central Valley reservoirs for no apparent good reason, Trump declared that some of this water was heading to Los Angeles – even though it wasn’t heading to Los Angeles and couldn’t go to Los Angeles. The election lie he refused to let die: What can you even say about this one at this point? Trump’s win in the free and fair 2024 election did not convince him to abandon his endless lying about his defeat in the free and fair 2020 election. More than four years after his loss to Joe Biden, he repeated his “rigged” nonsense during at least three events on his 2025 inauguration day alone, then a bunch of times after that. That fable about Olympic boxers, again: Trump, once a prominent promoter of lies about President Barack Obama’s birthplace, continued to demonstrate no hesitation lying about not only policy issues but also individual people. This time, to promote his push to try to get transgender athletes banned from the Olympics, he told his familiar story about how two gold medalists in women’s boxing at the Games in Paris last year were men who “transitioned.” Wrong. As the International Olympic Committee repeatedly noted during the Olympics, when Trump and others made such claims, neither champion had transitioned; both were born as female and have always competed in women’s events. Even the discredited boxing authority that controversially disqualified the women from a 2023 competition, vaguely claiming a test had found they had unfair competitive advantages, did not allege they had transitioned. The president’s fictionalized northern neighbor: Before taking office, Trump casually asserted that the Canadian people “like” his idea of Canada becoming the 51st US state. That was the opposite of the truth; the idea is hugely unpopular with the Canadian public. Then, after his inauguration, Trump continued to make stuff up about Canada – at one point posting on social media and then saying out loud that Canada prohibits US banks from doing business there. He added, “Can you believe that?” No doubt some Americans believe it, but it’s false. Blasting Biden for a program launched under Trump: After the deadly January collision between a military helicopter and a passenger jet, Trump blamed Biden administration diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration without providing any evidence any FAA diversity policy had anything to do with the crash. He added in a fictional storyabout a frantic last-minute Biden push to hire people with significant disabilities as air traffic controllers, failing to explain that this FAA pilot program was actually a years-old initiative launched during his own administration in 2019. Relentless deception about who pays tariffs: When Trump talked about the tariffs he imposed on Chinese imports in his first presidency, he spoke of how much money “from China” these tariffs generated for the US Treasury. When he talked about the additional tariffs he plans to impose on various other countries during his current presidency, he spoke of a need to “charge them.” At no point did he acknowledge that US importers, not foreign countries, are the ones who pay the actual tariff charges – or that study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan trade commission, found that Americans ended up bearing almost the entire cost of his first-term tariffs on Chinese products. A wild exaggeration of the increase in autism rates: Trump keeps flirting with, though not explicitly endorsing, the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that childhood vaccines cause autism – and in a social media post in early February, he inflated the extent of the increase in the known prevalence of autism over the last two decades. “20 years ago, Autism in children was 1 in 10,000. NOW IT’S 1 in 34,” Trump wrote. “WOW! Something’s really wrong.” Aside from the fact that experts say the increase in autism diagnoses (to 1 in 36 children by age 8 in 2020) likely has to do with greater awareness of the symptoms and improved screening practices, public statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the known prevalence in 2004 was 1 in 125 children, not “1 in 10,000.” That’s a pretty big difference. China’s (non-)operation of the Panama Canal: Much of Trump’s lying is ad-libbed. Some of it, however, is planned in advance. Some of it, however, is written into his prepared speeches. He said in his inaugural address in January: “Above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” This would have been a good line if China was actually operating the Panama Canal. Itisn’t; Panama is, though Trump could have raised legitimate questions about China’s influence in the area. Trump’s invented dominance with “the youth vote”: Trump said some accurate things while touting his victory in the 2024 election, such as the fact that he swept all seven swing states. But in keeping with his longstanding practice of exaggerating even legitimate accomplishments, he also kept sprinkling in a claim that wasn’t even close to correct – an assertion that he won the youth vote “by 36 points.” In fact, exit polls show he lost the youth vote to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Even if these polls were off, there’s no basis for the claim that he won the youth vote by 36.

TOP 3 R2 MATAKANA GIRL - looks well placed here, after doing best work late. Dam won 6 on good ground, so looking to see more improvement today.  R4 MELTEMI - Nice 2nd to We Found Love, beautifully bred to get over more ground later, but will take some stopping here. R6 TREAT YOURSELF - Will have improved with first run over 2000m, bred to run some this trip and longer, nice draw. (Granddam won the 2018 Cuddle Stakes and was a winner of 9). Keep watching over ground in 2025. Best Value R8 UNSCRIPTED - Needs a good track, if so, big chance stepping up in distance after doing best work late. over 1600m R9 GUM BASHER - Eye-catching fresh up, nice draw and won 2nd up. Capable type.   Good luck. 

For the first time in the U.S. since data has been recorded, the racing-related fatality rate for the majority of U.S. races—specifically tracks under the oversight of HISA—fell below 1.00 per 1,000 starts for a calendar year in 2024.View the full article

Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races has canceled its Feb. 20 card as a result of the bitter cold and single-digit forecasted wind chills. View the full article

Eight racehorses, seven trainers, and one jockey account for the 16 finalists that will comprise the National Museum of Racing's 2025 Hall of Fame ballot, as chosen by the Museum's Hall of Fame Nominating Committee. View the full article

Wonderful move, great idea