November 18, 2006 - page 3



that my favorite moment was a coincidence that made my horse racing heart go pitter-patter: randomly running into the TVG camera crew while we were stuck waiting to cross an intersection. They, like me, were in town for the Japan Cup on Sunday and seemed just as shocked to run into Americans that knew who they were as I was to find someone to talk horse racing with at 7 a.m. in Tokyo surrounded by thousands of pounds of fish.

Sunday was my birthday, which gave me some extra leverage in convincing Whitney to join me on my pilgrimage to

Tokyo Racecourse for the Japan Cup, Japan’s biggest horse race. (Thanks again, Whit!) It was a rather odd experience; I’ve never felt so close to home and so far away at the same time. We could have been at Churchill Downs fighting crowds and cheering the horses raucously down the homestretch, yet it was still very different. First of all, it was so polite: to reserve a seat, even a spot to stand, all you had to do was lay down a sheet of newspaper and it was yours for the day no matter where you went. There were probably 100,000 people there, all straining to see the track, yet nobody disturbed the rows of paper-claimed seats.