Race Track Diary, Entry Number Seven

Century Mile Racetrack (April 18, 2025)

Introduction

This blog and some following blogs are sections from an informal diary of “visits to the race-track” at a particular time and place, by a person who has followed the races with varying levels of participation over a long period. These relate primarily to some visits to the track and/or off-track betting venues in the 2025 period and onward. They contain observations about the activity, both specific and general. Although these remarks are personal, they also reflect general cultural and historical trends, as they have impacted horse-racing, wagering and culture in general.

The setting is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (population of about one million plus). However, I imagine that the observations would apply to many places in the world, as they are a reflection of how changing trends in technology, globalization and culture in general have affected this ancient and honourable activity of horse-racing.

For now, I will use what I call “polished point-form” for the narrative.

7 – Century Mile 4 (April 18, 2025)

This is the fourth visit to Century Mile, the actual racetrack near the Edmonton International Airport. It would be interesting to hit some other OTB spots, but brother Craig wants to stick with the tried and true for now.
Early on, it was a fairly good afternoon crowd, though it did dwindle down to a hearty few as the supper hour approached. That also coincided with most of the big eastern tracks finishing their cards for the day. After that, harness racing tends to take center stage and that is a bit more of a niche market (though Craig likes betting the trotters).
I mentioned to Craig that on our last outing, I discovered that I had more money in my wallet in the morning than I had when I left the track. Some amusing fellow near us heard that, and suggested that I may have had gained possession of some other fellows wallet, inadvertently or not. I told him that I would check to see that no strangers were living in the basement of my house.
Most of these fellows, amusing or not, drifted away after an hour or two, with only the occasional person replacing them. Craig said that the place had been far more busy a few years earlier. Perhaps the hangover effect of the Covid lock-downs and related public policies had impacted the crowds.
Of course it might pick up once the actual horses start racing at this track. That should happen in another couple of weeks, though the schedule is abbreviated, compared to the good old days. Basically, there will only be racing on two days of the week usually, with the days varying a bit. During the golden age, there was live racing most nights, either thoroughbreds or harnesses. Compared to the present, those crowds were major-league big.
I had researched the internet about the mystery of the magnetic cutlery that we had observed on our last visit to this place. That was when I discovered that the cutlery that came with my French fries were strongly magnetized, to the extent that you could easily drag one around the table without even touching it with the other. I relayed the explanation that I had come across to the waitress, who was the same one who served us the previous week.
The most popular explanation involved a magnetized garbage disposal in restaurants, which can catch cutlery that had been accidentally been tossed with the food scraps. Some people on the internet were skeptical of that – I tend to agree with them. It seems unlikely that a few passes through a field like that would result in the cutlery gaining much of a magnetization. But, in light of a better story, that will have to do.
Santa Anita was running today, so I focused my efforts on that track. Craig put some money down on those races, as well as betting on the bucket-pullers at Mohawk/Woodbine as well as some other small harness track in Ontario.
The latter offered up some comical prices. Craig showed me a voucher from a trifecta (three-horse) bet that paid him something ludicrous like $5.50 on a 20 cent bet. On the other hand, he missed a high paying pick-4, with two horses finishing in the ‘wrong’ order ( i.e. he picked all the horses, but a couple finished place-win instead of win-place). So it goes.
As for myself, I won a pretty decent win ticket, which paid off at 12 to 1 odds, so I came out of the day ahead, if only by a small margin. Mind you, in percentage terms it wasn’t bad, about 25%. The horse had good numbers; I don’t know why its odds were so high, but I’ll take it.
The NHL hockey playoffs were fast approaching, so that was an item of discussion. We agreed that with so many teams sitting out their best players, the last games of the season were not very useful for analyzing team strengths. It reminded us of horse-racing, where certain trainers are assumed to be "darkening their horse's form", by making the past performances non-predictive, so that they could stage a later betting coup.
In other words, they make their horse look worse than it really is, for a few races, to reduce betting on it, resulting in better odds, and a high priced payout to those in the circle for that race when the horse is allowed to run its best time.
There wasn’t much else to report on this day. By the time we left for the city, traffic had lightened and the early evening twilight was still bright enough for a pleasant trip home.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since I am running a book publishing blog, here is a plug for a horse-racing oriented short story that I wrote.

A Dark Horse

In “A Dark Horse”, a gambler’s desire to hit a big win seems to lead him to make a Faustian bargain with a supernatural evil. Or is it all just a string of unnaturally good luck?

The story is just $0.99 U.S. (equivalent in other currencies) and about 8000 words. It is also available on Kindle Unlimited and is occasionally on free promotion.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Spain:https://www.amazon.es/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01MDMY2BR

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01M9BS3Y5

A Dark Horse

Every gambler is bound to run out of luck eventually, right?

By far my favourite type of horror is psychological horror. I was quite pleased with how Mr. Olausen frightened his audience without spilling a single drop of blood or so much as hinting at anything gory. He knew exactly what hints to drop for us that made us deliciously dread the next scene simply by throwing out hints about who or what the dark horse might actually represent. This is the kind of stuff I love getting scared by, especially as Halloween approaches.

It would have been helpful to have more character development in this short story. While I certainly wouldn’t expect to see as much time spent on this as I would for a full-length novel, I did have trouble connecting to the main characters due to how little I knew about them and how much their personalities seemed to remain the same no matter what happened to them. If not for this issue, I would have felt comfortable choosing a much higher rating as the plot itself was well done.

I must admit to not knowing much about gambling at all, so I appreciated the brief explanations the narrator shared about how placing bets works and why some people have so much trouble walking away from a bet. While I will leave it up to experts on these topics to say how accurate everything was, I did enjoy learning more about the main character’s addiction and what he hoped to gain from betting on just one more game or race. It gave me a stronger sense of empathy for folks in his position.

A Dark Horse – A Gothic Tale was a deliciously chilling story for the Halloween season and beyond.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And here is a book about my dad’s sapper unit that I wrote:

The Sappers' War: 12th Field Company Royal Canadian Engineers, Oct 1943 to Sept 1945

What follows is a review of the history of the 12th Field Company, Royal Canadian Engineers, primarily relating to the time that the company was in the Italian and Northwestern European theatres during World War II. Though the book focuses on the experiences of a particular company of Canadian military engineers, it also discusses some of the wider issues of the second world war and how it affected the people wholived through the era, civilian and military. Among those are my father (a sapper or military engineer) and mother (a war worker in wartime Britain and ultimately a war bride).

Thus, this is meant to be an informal and unofficial history of the company, written by an interested party in an effort to understand what these men went through during this period, and how that experience affected them and other people who lived through the war. The military aspects of the company's history are there (e.g. training, fighting, building bridges, detecting mines, maintaining routes), as are the cultural factors that influenced them and their times (e.g. the movies that they watched, the drinking they did, the many diseases they faced, their interactions with the Italian, British and other civilians that they lived among, their worries for the future). Some focus on life on the British home front is also given, via the experiences of my mother and her family.

Since many people had family and relations that lived during this time, it is my hope that the account will be of general interest to them, and to any that have a particular interest in this critical interval in history. Also, though the text relates specifically to Canadian sappers, I believe that many of the experiences will be common to the soldiers and loved ones of other nations who lived through the war, especially Americans and those from Britain and the British Commonwealth.

The primary sources of this document are the 12th Field Company War Diaries and related orders, with some material from The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, Volume 2 as well as various official histories by the Department of National Defence. Various other published sources are used as well, especially when discussing the wider issues of the war or the army experience (e.g. Churchill’s history of the war), or conversely when relating very specific episodes of the war (e.g. Popski’s Private Army in late 1944). Personal accounts of my father’s or mother’s stories also augment the narrative. I have tried to fit those in during appropriate time periods, though some stories are more general and have therefore don’t necessarily relate to the time period being discussed. Nonetheless, they do help capture the essence of “being there” during the war years.

The War Diary is a day by day account of the primary activities of a given unit, as recorded by personnel in the headquarters staff of that unit, and signed off by the commander of the unit. As such, it is an official record, though the writers often brought a bit of their own character into the document. Naturally, as a relatively brief document it can’t hope to capture the complexity of the individual stories of 280 or so men, so the family lore generally has no corresponding entry in the War Diary, though there are sometimes tantalizing hints and near-verifications of these personal accounts.

There are a number of other sources for the book, from official histories to popular history books. I include quotations and references from these works (an eclectic mix), as I believe that they also shed light on different aspects of this period of time, and besides that, are just interesting accounts, in and of themselves.

U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

U.K.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B09HSXN6Q2

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09HSXN6Q2