By Andrea Branchini
The name of the wonderful and deserving winner of the 2021 Arc De Triomphe worries me.
Why the letter 'R' at the end of the first noun? No-final-R Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was another Italian poet who thought as big as Hollywood and wrote incredibly long epic poems about knights in shining armors and their girlfriends, like his (better) predecessor Ludovico Ariosto. I have asked a few Teutonic friends if “Torquator” means anything technical, colloquial or otherwise in German, to no avail. So word play is out.
Do only impressionable and nerdy Italian schoolchildren know Torquato Tasso? Well, not really, and here comes my first disclosure. My father briefly owned a part of a Group-1 winning son of American stallion Tasso (by Fappiano out of Ecstacism), the now obscure 1985 GI Breeders Cup Juvenile winner that photo-bombed William T. Young's legendary Storm Cat on that day of days. That half-ours horse had been named by his previous owner “Torrismondo”, just like an also now obscure tragedy by, yes, our poem-writing Torquato Tasso. Give English nobility its due: they know their foreign poets when they want to.
My second disclosure is that I put $2 on Torquator Tasso on Sunday. Because German horses do win the Arc from time to time, because horseracing is a splendidly unpredictable game, or, simply, just because.
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