Rowdy crowds at the Maryland Hunt Cup and the 100th running of the Kentucky Derby drew ire from editor Snowden Carter. “Never having been a man with a great love for change, I found myself dismayed at Churchill Downs this month when the largest crowd [163,628] ever to see a horse race in this country came within an inch of seizing control of the Kentucky Derby program.
It was frightening to watch from the roof of the grandstand as an estimated 100,000 young people jammed into the vast centerfield and ran wild with their power,” reported Carter. Coverage of the Derby, won by Cannonade, included this observation: “Naked and near-naked took over [the] centerfield, making it a Garden of Holy Hell at $5 a head.”
Carter didn’t mince words about Maryland’s timber classic as the headline of his editorial said it all: “Hooligans Threaten Hunt Cup.”
The 12-length victory by 9-year-old Burnmac in the 78th Maryland Hunt Cup represented a second-generation triumph, following failure, for horse, owner and rider. Burnmac, sired by Cormac, owned by Gene Weymouth and ridden by Louis “Paddy” Neilson, was the fifth Pennsylvania horse in six years to capture the Hunt Cup – three of the five were sired by Cormac, as was the 1974 runner-up, Eastmac.
n Photographer Skip Ball recounted his adventure to photograph the closely guarded arrival of Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon to Churchill Downs. Using the “spy techniques” he had watched on television, Ball took an educated guess on where the princess would arrive, and with boldness and inability to hear the word “no”, he got the shot.
n Janon Fisher Jr., a founder and three-time president of the Maryland Horse Breeders Association, was honored by the Maryland Racing Writers Association as the recipient of the annual Outstanding Achievement Award. The trainer of three-time Maryland Hunt Cup winners Blockade and Mountain Dew also had stakes winners on the flat, was twice a director of the Maryland Jockey Club (Pimlico), as well as that track’s treasurer, and was for five years Master of the Green Spring Valley Hounds.
