The TDN Writers' Room team was feeling festive as we closed out 2024 with a special year-end episode. Presented as always by Keeneland and hosted by Bill Finley, Zoe Cadman and Randy Moss, this week's show features a variety of write-in questions from viewers and some other questions for our hosts ranging from light-hearted topics that gave the trio the opportunity to reminisce on their many years in racing to a few more thought-provoking subjects regarding the current state of racing and what they are most looking forward to seeing on the racetrack in 2025.
We kicked off the episode by asking each host to look back and tell us about the moment that got them hooked on the sport.
Born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Moss had an easy answer.
“When you drove past Oaklawn Park back in the day, and we're talking late '60s, I was a little kid sitting in the backseat of my parents' car and it used to be a little like Saratoga in that there were stables on the opposite side of Central Avenue and so the crossing guards would stop the traffic as horses crossed the street,” Moss recalled. “So I would sit there in the backseat and I would see these beautiful horses in front of me and the exercise riders on their backs. That's one of my earliest memories was watching that and it snowballed from there.”
Cadman, who hails from Somerset, England, is a lifelong equestrian who happened upon the racing world almost by accident.
“During schooltime, we got the chance to do a work experience,” she said on the show. “The closest racing yard to me was Philip Hobbs, so me and my friend Rosie both applied. I had a pony who was pretty quick so I thought, 'Oh, I'm going to go to a racing yard. This is going to be so cool.' I rode out for Philip Hobbs for a week and got run off with a couple of times. His gallops go uphill and they stop at a road that went downhill. I went all the way down the road on one of these jumper horses. And I got hooked.”
As for Finley, his was a story that many people in our industry share where family members introduced him to the sport.
“Both my father and my brother, who's 10 years older than me, were big racing fans,” Finley recalled. “When I was six, my brother had his driver's license. There are stories of him babysitting me where he didn't tell our parents what we were going to do and, living in Cleveland, we went to Northfield Park. He would babysit me at the trotter track there.”
Later in the show, write-in questions from viewers ranged from topics like why final scratches and changes are not posted to online resources until a few hours before the first post, what more should major industry organizations be doing to move the sport forward, and why it seems that workouts in the East are labeled “B” for breezing when workouts in the West are labeled “H” for handily.
The team wrapped up the episode by reflecting on 2024 and looking ahead to 2025. Which newly turned 3-year-olds are they most looking forward to watching develop next year? Answers ranged from Sovereignty (Into Mischief), who broke his maiden for Bill Mott in the GIII Street Sense Stakes on Oct. 27, and of course East Avenue (Medaglia d'Oro), the GI Claiborne Breeders' Futurity winner who stumbled at the break in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile but should have a promising future ahead.
The TDN Writers' Room is also presented by WinStar Farm, Pennsylvania Horse Breeders' Association, the Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, West Point Thoroughbreds and XBTV.com. The Writers' Room team looks forward to returning in 2025.
To listen to this week's show as an audio podcast, click here.
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