It’s official. Super filly Rachel Alexandra will run in the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown. And she will be paired with racing’s new superstar jockey, Calvin Borel of Catahoula, La. It took a lot of jockeying to get Alexandra in the race. While she did not run in the Kentucky Derby, Rachel Alexandra’s new owners are ready to have her compete with the boys. That prompted other Preakness competitors to signal they might fill any open slots with other horses of their own, in effect keeping Rachel Alexandra out. Finally, the dust has settled and Alexandra is in.
Her entry means that Cajun jockey Borel will not be riding Mine That Bird, the 50-1 longshot he guided to a stunning victory in the derby and the only horse with a shot at winning the Triple Crown (and the horse that Borel is riding on the cover of the latest issue of Sports Illustrated). Rather, Borel is choosing Rachel, a horse he has called the best he has ever ridden. Borel is undefeated in five races this year atop Rachel Alexandra. The duo won the Kentucky Oaks, the premier race of top fillies, by 20 1/4 lengths.
This will be the first time in horse racing history that the winning jockey from the Kentucky Derby will ride a different horse in the Preakness. There have only been three occassions (the last in 1946) where the Derby-winning horse had a new jockey for the Preakness. Only Bold Venture, in 1936, won the first two races of the Triple Crown under different jockeys, Ira Hanford and George Woolf.
Borel and Rachel Alexandra appear to be the early favorite at the Preakness.
In rendering his ruling, District Judge John Trahan all but called the real estate developer a liar for inconsistencies in his accounts of what prompted him to punch a school teacher unconscious.
Frank’s Casing Crew, now doing business as Frank’s International, will make its final appearance on ABiz’s list of the Top 50 Privately Held Companies in Acadiana this year, and once again, it will likely be at the top with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. The 75-year-old company specializing in tubular fabrication and installation services to the oil and gas industry plans to go public this year.
The defeat, or rather highjacking of House Bill 420 in the final days of this year's Legislative Session, say Reps. Vincent Pierre and Terry Landry, is the result of the propaganda spread by one unidentified local media outlet and an unnamed former state Representative, but nothing to do with the original legislation's lack of checks, balances or details.
City-Parish Council Chairman Brandon Shelvin heaped steady doses of condescending ire on a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana executive while failing to reveal his financial ties to a BC/BS rival.
Abbeville native David Primeaux was a popular professor until his death late last year, and while he was successful at camouflaging a dark past, he couldn’t outlive it.
Tehmi Chassion’s failure to recuse himself in the school board’s selection of a group health benefits provider raises ‘serious questions’ on whether he violated state ethics law.
He’s a singer. A songwriter. A piano man. A family man. He’s even got his own Wikipedia entry. He’s David Egan. And he knows ancient secrets about the monolithic stones of Stonehenge that he’s not willing to share.
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