Page 4 - October 2008 The Game

4 The Game, October 2008 Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper 34th Annual Sovereign Awards - Important Dates
The Jockey Club of Canada, no later than 5:00 p.m. (ET) on Friday, October 31, 2008. The four media categories are: Feature Story, Newspaper Article, Photograph and Film/Video/Broadcast. Submissions must be of Canadian Thoroughbred racing or breeding content and must have been published or have aired between November 1, 2007 and October 31, 2008. Contestants in the media categories are limited to one submission per category. All submis- sions must be original works that have not previously been submitted to the Sovereign Awards. Internet submissions will be accepted provided the submission has appeared on a website af liated with a printed publication recognized by the Jockey Club of Canada.
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The 34th Annual Sovereign Awards will be held at the Four Season Hotel in Toronto on Friday, December 12, 2008.
In order to be eligible for consideration, 2-Year-Old horses must make two starts and horses 3-Years-Old and Up must make three starts in Canada by Sunday, November 23, 2008.
Eligible voters may begin voting online at 9:00 am (ET) on Thursday, November 27, 2008 and must cast their nal ballots by 12:00 (noon) (ET) on Monday, December 1, 2008. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Chartered Accoun- tants will audit the process and will release the names of the three nalists in the fourteen divisional categories to The Jockey Club of Canada for release to the public on Friday, December 5, 2008. The three nalists for Horse of the Year will be announced at time of presentation.
For additional information on this year’s Sovereign Awards or to order tickets please contact: Bridget Bimm, The Jockey Club of Canada, Telephone: 416-675-7756
Media submissions must be received in the of ce of
Thanksgiving
This is not a column about the holi- day we call Thanksgiving, although it is about being thankful. Mind you, with Thanksgiving coming up it seems more than appropriate that we focus on this subject. Our friends at Merriam-Web- ster, (thanks for selling out, Webster!), de ne the word thanksgiving as the following:
everywhere in the forms and
programs at every track and
while it’s wonderful when you
have a sparkling percentage of win- ners, the vast majority of competitors, especially trainers, owners and jockeys are dwelling in the lower percentile. However, where else can you nd your name publicly printed with regularity? In fact, there may be no industry that
with Chaplain Shawn
1: the act of giving thanks
2: a prayer expressing gratitude 3 a: a public acknowledgment or
I know of that has its own in-house production company where anyone, yes, even Chaplains, can get face time on the tube.
for anything.
I think thanksgiving is an attitude: it’s
an attitude of gratitude. Believe it not, we’ve never had it so good. You may think your dollar doesn’t go as far, but
I guarantee if you stop to look at all the junk you just can’t live without, and fo- cus on the things you need, you’ll nd that you’ll do just ne. Give me ve minutes of what you spend your money on and I’ll save you tons of moolah. The bible records that Jesus gave thanks at least 16 times, almost always for daily bread. Does anywhere else in the world eat like we do? Is there some country in Africa where obesity is epi- demic? Can you remember the last time you stopped and were grateful for what you were about to receive? I absolutely love this country- it’s not the greatest or perfect, but it beats out a whole lot of also-rans. Do you know that in Africa 3,000 children per day die from malaria, simply because they lack mosquito net- ting? (For a way to combat this, go to a site called www.nothingbutnets.net. For $10 you can save a life.) Now I don’t know your life, but I know for a fact we have nothing to fear from malaria. We eat, sleep and live well.
There’s an old hymn called “Count Your Blessings” that is very appropriate for the subject of gratitude. Rather than focus on what we lack, we’re to focus on what we have and be thankful for it.
Thousands before us have sacri ced so we may enjoy the fruits that, in many cases, they never saw. Horsemen and women who ran for nothing, built an industry from strands and worked harder in more dif cult conditions than we’ll ever imagine, laid the foundation so that we can count our blessings in this industry. This Thanksgiving, we need to pause and develop and “attitude of gratitude” for what we have, as op- posed to what we haven’t. After that, if you still, still can’t be thankful for this industry and nation, then leave. Just go. I hear they’re hiring in Afghanistan.
celebration of divine goodness
b: capitalized: thanksgiving day
Sometimes it’s hard to be thankful, especially when things aren’t going ex- actly the way you’ve planned them. It’s easy to focus on what’s going wrong as opposed to what’s going right in your world. If you’re a trainer, that crop of young horses you anticipated bringing you success might have come up with more problems than you could possibly believe. Your older horses, which you were hoping to carry the load until your younger charges started to shine, sud- denly found themselves a step slower. We’re in a business where our successes and more often our failures are slapped in our faces on a daily basis- it’s called the Daily Racing Form. Stats are
With that, we’re might think that we backstretch workers are exempt from this public humiliation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of those who “toil in dark- ness” take great pride in the work they do. If the horses we rub, gallop or walk don’t run well, this can be seen as a re ection of our own self-worth in their accomplishments. Even though most know that the best worker can’t make
a slow horse fast, we’re still in uenced by what happens on the track. It’s hard to be thankful when success is hard to come by. Everything that is wrong with the world and our lives seems to be magni ed and it’s hard to feel thankful
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