to move up and down
NEWQUAY, ENGLAND - MAY 17: Andy Burgess (Captain of Team First Great Western and Team Cornwall) rides his horse Shrivar into the sea at Watergate Bay as he practices for the beach polo competition being held on the beach this weekend on May 17, 2013 in Newquay, England. The players were practicing ahead of this weekend Veuve Clicquot Polo on the Beach at Watergate Bay, in north Cornwall, which is taking place tomorrow and Sunday, featuring some of the UK’s highest handicapped polo players. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)
Joel Rosario atop Orb celebrates after winning the 139th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 4, 2013 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo: Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
60% horse meat: Scandal widens to UK’s biggest supermarket chain after spaghetti bolognese contamination
Romania denied its abattoirs misrepresented horse meat as beef and said its agriculture minister will talk to his U.K. and French counterparts in Brussels this week as the scandal spread throughout Europe.
France will seek sanctions for negligence or fraud and put the meat and fish industries under surveillance to restore confidence. Investigators were at the offices of wholesale food distributor Comigel today, Benoit Hamon, junior minister for consumer affairs said at a press conference in Paris.
Tesco, the U.K.’s biggest supermarket chain, said three tests it carried out on frozen Everyday Value Spaghetti Bolognese supplied by Comigel contained as much as 60% horse DNA. Supermarkets in France, the U.K. and Ireland have removed frozen beef products from their shelves since undeclared horse meat was first discovered by the Irish Food Standards Authority last month. (CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images)
Runners take the water jump in The Burges Salmon Novices’ Limited Handicap Steeple Chase at Newbury racecourse in Newbury, England. (Photo by Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images)
Horsin’ around, Part VI: This is Marty the Horse. The Royal York in Toronto said they wouldn’t let him in. It is part of CFL tradition for Stampeders fans to bring a horse in the lobby, but the hotel said it had “health concerns.” After fan outcry, the hotel staff relented and now Marty will be free to roam the lobby to his heart’s content at 2PM ET. (Photos: Matthew Sherwood for National Post)
Crazy photo: Ruby Walsh riding Keppols Hill falls at The Racing Welfare Jonny Brown Novice’ Steeple Chase at Exeter racecourse. (Photo by Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images)
A Carabinieri crash course on how not to dismount a horse in Siena
A group of horseback-mounted Carabinieri galloped around Siena’s main square during a parade in advance of the famous Palio race, but as they navigated the turn, one rider (or was it the horse?) miscalculated and crash-landed into the side padding. (Photos: Reuters; AFP/Getty Images)
Triple Crown dream dies as I’ll Have Another pulled from Belmont Stakes
I’ll Have Another, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, will not run in Saturday’s 144th Belmont Stakes, trainer Doug O’Neill announced on Friday, ending the colt’s bid for a US Triple Crown sweep.
The chestnut horse was made a 4-5 favourite on Wednesday but O’Neill chose to scratch him from the race after a morning workout, ending I’ll Have Another’s chance of becoming the 12th horse to win all three flat races in the same year.
Not since Affirmed in 1978 has a horse completed the triple sweep, with 11 hopefuls in the 34 years since then thwarted by failure at the Belmont, the longest of the three races at 1 1/2 miles. (Photos: David J. Phillip/AP Photo; Al Bello/Getty Images)
Eadweard J. Muybridge — one of the original men in motion — celebrated with a Google Doodle
Eadweard J. Muybridge — born 182 years ago today — invented the motion picture while trying to settle an argument about trotting horses.
He did this with the help of California governor and race-horse owner Leland Stanford, who had taken it upon himself to prove that there was a moment of suspension during a trot — a point where all four hooves were off the ground.
It seems like a trivial exercise, but the moment passes too quickly to spot with the human eye and 19th-century cameras weren’t nearly fast enough to capture it. It was an unsolvable puzzle.
Court Red Handed falls, unseating jockey Ennis during the Diamond Jubilee National Hunt Steeple Chase at the Cheltenham Festival horse racing meet in Gloucestershire, western England. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth
Theatre review: War Horse gallops off to victory
The transforming moment in War Horse — transforming in every sense — comes about 20 minutes in. Joey, the title horse, changes before our eyes from foal to full-grown stallion. It would be unfair to reveal exactly how, but up until this point Joey has been a life-size skeletal puppet, visibly manipulated by three performers whom it is sometimes confusingly easy to mistake for characters in the story; stable hands perhaps?
The puppeteers are still in evidence when Joey grows up, but they’re now so disposed that we can tune them out. For the rest of the evening we believe in Joey as an actual horse, even while remaining happily aware that he’s a product of theatrical wizardry. The magic is manifold. The technical peak coincides with an emotional peak. And that synergy, of spectacle and feeling, keeps going throughout the show.
Head or tail: Giving life to the War Horse
When audiences see Joey full-grown for the first time, galloping to the front of the stage, its paper mane and tail flapping like streamers, they applaud like children at a circus. These horses neigh and nuzzle. They rear and fall.
Theatregoers are witnessing a magic trick, a feat of the imagination. For when the two people controlling the horse from the inside and the one manipulating its head are in synch, the puppeteers disappear. However, when they are not connected, when there is a misstep, a break in the rhythm, the audience very quickly sees three grown men trying to operate an equine skeleton. (Photos: Courtesy of Mirvish)
An ode to Rapid Redux
Allen Abel: The Brave Little Horse That Never Loses stepped lightly into stall No. 3. It was the coldest day of the new month and, like every other thoroughbred in the world, The Brave Little Horse had been marked another year older on the first of January. Photo: Rob Carr/Getty Images
Gold medal horse Hickstead dead
Hickstead, the “superstar” stallion that carried Canadian equestrian champion Eric Lamaze to Olympic gold-medal glory in Beijing in 2008, died suddenly during a competition in Italy on Sunday, tragically ending a partnership that helped push the country to the top of the sport of show jumping.
Montreal-born Lamaze, the world’s current No. 1 rider, had just taken Hickstead through a nearly faultless 13-fence course at the Rolex FEI World Cup in Verona, Italy, when the 15-year-old horse abruptly collapsed and died.
“We finished our round, I circled and was leaving the ring, and he collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack,” Lamaze said in a news release. “It is the most tragic thing that has ever happened. We had him until he was 15, and we had a great time together. He was the best horse in the world. We are all devastated.” (Photo: BRUNO DE LORENZO/AFP/Getty Images)
By a nose
French stayer Dunaden prevailed in a thrilling nose-to-nose sprint to the line with British-trained Red Cadeaux to win the $6.2-million Melbourne Cup in a photo-finish at Flemington Race course on Tuesday. REUTERS/Racing Victoria/Handout
Tiny Sable Island Canada’s newest national park
It is just a long, slender, green-bean of a thing, but this dune off the cold coast of Nova Scotia is anything but a harmless strip of sand. Its swirling waters are known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, for they have swallowed 350 ships since 1583. Its underwater Scotian Shelf hosts 18 shark species who feast on the island’s grey seals.
The island is tall and narrow — 40-km in length, and only 1.5-km in width — and its body is held together by a skeleton of beach grass that traps the sand granules and the pirate wreckage buried within. Hundreds of untamed horses run wild, their matted manes unruly in the blustering wind where the Labrador current collides with the warm gulf stream and breeds thick fog.
This is Sable Island, a crescent-shaped mass roughly 300 kilometres out to sea. On Monday, Sable Island was formally named a Canadian national park reserve to ensure, the environment minister said in a statement, that the “iconic” and “fabled” island will be protected for all time.
