Bacon, betting and a birthday

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2018 (2866 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was my sister-in-law’s 60th birthday celebration so, naturally, we all went to the racetrack.

Mostly I think we went to Assiniboia Downs because my sister-in-law is a big fan of animals, even ones that you could not charitably describe as “cuddly.”

This is the same sister-in-law who, at the beginning of the year, flew to Australia, mostly to visit with her son and his family, but also to spend two weeks working at a bat sanctuary.

I quizzed her about the bat trip at the racetrack and it sounded like she had a wonderful time, although she shared a few stories that caused me to perspire like a Butterball turkey on Thanksgiving.

For instance, there was the time she was working in the office at the sanctuary and someone came in and started stuffing towels into the opening under the door.

“What are you doing?” my sister-in-law politely asked.

“There’s a python in here somewhere and we don’t want it to get out,” is what the person explained.

Ha ha ha. OK, I’m not kidding. My sister-in-law stuck around and eventually they retrieved a four-metre snake that was keeping cool in the rafters.

I personally would have sprinted away at lightspeed, leaving a Doug-shaped hole in the door.

There was also the time they pulled two poisonous snakes and a poisonous toad out of the pool, but we don’t have time to talk about that because we need to talk about horse racing.

So there were about 20 of us who gathered to celebrate my sister-in-law’s 60th birthday, which we did by engaging in two main activities: 1) eating brunch; and 2) betting on the ponies.

I’d like to start by talking about brunch, because I believe combining breakfast and lunch into a single meal is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind.

The brunch at the racetrack consisted of every kind of food you would ever want to put in your mouth, including a never-ending supply of bacon. Whenever the bacon container looked as if it was running low, a dining-room employee would sprint out to the buffet with a replacement container groaning with sizzling pork strips.

Also, there was a gooey dessert that, according to a little sign on the table, was a “bacon bourbon brownie,” which means it was a dessert combining the three main food groups: 1) bacon; 2) bourbon; and 3) chocolate.

I’d like to tell you more about this brownie, but I am roughly halfway through today’s column and I have not yet said a word about the noble sport of horse racing, which — brunch aside — is the main activity at Assiniboia Downs.

All the relatives and friends were divided into two teams and we were supposed to bet as teams, then toss our winnings into a bag to divvy up later, which is when I stopped listening to the rules.

Even before brunch was finished, the Downs sent experts to our tables to explain how the betting system works and how you can decide what horses to bet on.

“You can go and look at the horses before each race,” the expert said, pointing at the paddock area. “Some people like to bet on a horse based on its colour. You can also check out whether the horse looks fit or chubby. You probably shouldn’t bet on the chubby ones.”

My sister-in-law frowned at this. “I’ll bet some of the chubby ones are pretty fast,” she chimed in.

Which is when my beloved spouse, She Who Must Not be Named, eyeballed my physique and added: “Yes, he probably wouldn’t have said that if he’d seen you sprinting up to the bacon station at the buffet.”

Fortunately, I was too busy studying the racing program to become offended. I am one of those veteran bettors who, based on years of experience, places bets in the following manner: 1) I look at the names of the horses in the racing program; and 2) I pick the name I think is the funniest.

Other people eschew this system, even if they don’t know what eschew means. My sister-in-law, for instance, treats the program, which is written by rocket scientists for other rocket scientists, as if it were the Bible.

“You see this symbol,” she told me, pointing at some squiggle on the page, “that means the jockey is left-handed and enjoys watching PBS.”

Then she would point at some other random squiggle and add: “That means the horse is a two-year-old, experiences bouts of separation anxiety and doesn’t care for the colour purple.”

Next, we stomped down to track level to place our bets, look at the horses march around and snort and comment on the fashion choices of the other bettors.

Out of journalistic fairness, I will confess that I had expected most of the people at the track to be grizzled guys who were old enough to remember Paul McCartney’s first band — husky guys sporting Hawaiian shirts visible to astronauts on board the International Space Station, smoking stogies the size of piano legs and randomly spitting on the ground to convey the concept that they take horse racing seriously.

Instead, I discovered there were a lot of young, stylish people there, including a fair number of families accompanied by toddlers, all of whom seemed to understand the symbols in the racing program better than I did.

You will be stunned to hear I picked the winner in the first race, a horse with extremely long legs called Tame the Beast.

“C’MON, TAME THE BEAST!!!” I shrieked as he and/or she rocketed to the finish line. Sadly, I had bet the quinella, wherein you only win if you pick the first two finishers in any order; the other horse I picked finished dead last.

In the next race, the last one I bet on, I picked a horse called Trebacious, because the name made me giggle. This horse also came in first, but I let my sister-in-law keep the $15 in winnings, because I’m a decent, caring person.

Also I didn’t have any room in my pockets, because they were already stuffed with bacon.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca