So how do I join the court case? My partner wants her $20 back.
I bet on her so I could have the win ticket. My Seattle Slew KD win ticket is a refridgerator magnet!
Either that van driver is VERY honest or…very frightened.
Yes it was definitely easy for her, but I want to see her do the same to some higher class fillies before I say ‘ok, take on the boys’. Can’t help being just a tad skeptical, the fillies who can wallop the best of the boys are few and far between. Would be great, though, if she’s the one.
Does it bother anyone else that they give a filly five pounds over the boys? It bothers me. Theh girls can race in the boys’ races with less weight, but the boys can’t even enter the girls’ races. What happened to keeping things even? I know it’s about handicapping, etc., but that’s bull. You’d never see Phil get a shot or two over Tiger in the Master’s because of handicapping! If I were the Wygods, I’d have her run at 122 to see how good she really is.
gulp! The super Cat might be taking on the boys earlier then expected 
The Blood-Horse 2/25/05 “Weather to Determine Sweet Catomine’s Next Start”
Mr. and Mrs. Martin Wygod’s Sweet Catomine, last year’s juvenile filly champ, has been nominated to the March 5 Fountain of Youth Stakes (gr. II), and could run in the nine-furlong race at Florida’s Gulfstream Park if the bad weather in Southern California hampers her training, trainer Julio Canani said Friday.
Yup. I hope the fantastic filly ends up with a trainer that can sort through all this and let us watch her race at her best.
Nanc
The Blood-Horse has a pedigree profile on Sweet Catomine 
Whether Sweet Catomine can best the colts is still unproven, but on paper she should have no trouble getting the distance. Although her sire, the brilliant Storm Cat, is better known for getting precocious juveniles and miler speed, his dual classic-winning son Tabasco Cat demonstrated that with the right mare, Storm Cat can get distance runners as well. Sweet Life, dam of Sweet Catomine, looks to be the right kind of mare.
Whoa, I’m confused! 
So this incredible filly was the favorite to win the Santa Anita Derby, but pulled a shoe a few days out. Then, she was NQR the night before, so she was smuggled off the grounds for extensive oxygen treatment and time in the chamber before returning to the track in the wee hours of race day. She runs poorly in the race, ends up 5th, and her owner blames the tranqs, lasix and her foot (but ran her anyway). Than decides to pull her from the trainer and move her to another barn. And sets the van driver up to take the fall from the pre-race outing at the vet’s clinic. And we still don’t know all that’s wrong with the filly or if she’ll be ok?
Is this it, or am I missing something? Pretty strange stuff! 
As people can assume I am rather in favor of this great filly
Calm filly with high-strung trainer
By JAY PRIVMAN
Daily Racing Form 4/6/05
ARCADIA, Calif. - Sweet Catomine is behaving with her usual aplomb this week, but her trainer is washing out. Julio Canani never before has run a horse in the Kentucky Derby, or the Santa Anita Derby, let alone a filly, let alone the favorite, which is what Sweet Catomine will be when the Grade 1, $750,000 Santa Anita Derby is run for the 68th time on Saturday.
Couple that with the training adjustment Canani had to make Wednesday morning to protect Sweet Catomine’s left rear hoof, and Canani was one part animated, one part agitated, and 100 percent stark-raving mad on Wednesday at Santa Anita.
“I’ve got to get a Jacuzzi. I’ve got to relax. I’m [messed] up, okay,” were some of the things Canani said while scurrying from the stable area to the track, dropping F-bombs along the way. “I’m going mad.”
Marty Wygod, who owns Sweet Catomine with his wife, Pam, and Wygod’s confidante, attorney Roger Licht, watched from a safe distance.
“Pam asked me where to make reservations for Saturday,” Licht said. “I told her to make Julio’s at Cedars-Sinai.”
Strapping Canani down on a hospital gurney might be the only way to keep him still. He is sure to wander off and watch the derby alone, up the stretch in the box-seat section, as he did when Sweet Catomine won the Santa Anita Oaks last month. “I can’t take this [stuff],” Canani said.
Adding to the stress level Wednesday was that Sweet Catomine was forced to jog, rather than have a routine gallop. She did not have a shoe on her left rear hoof, and the coronet band was wrapped with a protective gauze.
According to Canani, Sweet Catomine dislodged that shoe on Tuesday night. Canani said Sweet Catomine was scheduled to be shod on all four hooves on Wednesday afternoon. He said he did not want to reset her left rear shoe for training on Wednesday, then pull it off and put a new plate on Wednesday afternoon.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s okay. She’ll gallop the rest of the week.”
Sweet Catomine landed post 2 against 10 males when the field of 11 was drawn on Wednesday morning for the 1 1/8-mile Santa Anita Derby, the final major West Coast prep for the May 7 Kentucky Derby. Jeff Tufts, the morning-line maker at Santa Anita, made Sweet Catomine the 7-5 favorite. She carries 117 pounds, five fewer than the males.
The Santa Anita Derby has seen 25 fillies take on males, beginning in 1935. There have been three fillies who won the race - Ciencia in 1939, Silver Spoon in 1959, and Winning Colors in 1988. Both Silver Spoon and Winning Colors were favored. Winning Colors is the last filly to win the Kentucky Derby, and is one of only three to wear the roses.
Sweet Catomine will be facing males for the first time on Saturday, but she has earned the opportunity. Since finishing second in her debut going 5 1/2 furlongs at Del Mar last July, Sweet Catomine has won five consecutive races. Her victory in last year’s Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies earned her the Eclipse Award as champion 2-year-old filly.
It was after that race, according to Wygod, that he began to entertain the thought of running Sweet Catomine in the Santa Anita Derby and then the Kentucky Derby. Sweet Catomine has complied this year by winning her two preps, the Santa Ysabel Stakes and Santa Anita Oaks.
Wygod has gone so far as to say that if Sweet Catomine doesn’t run well enough to go on to the Kentucky Derby, she probably would not go in the Kentucky Oaks. Canani is being more circumspect regarding the whole scenario. “Let’s see what happens on Saturday and then talk on Sunday,” he said.
“I’m nervous and apprehensive,” Wygod said. “I’m much more nervous about this race than the others. The excitement keeps mounting. It’s part excitement, part nervousness.”
Sweet Catomine was bred by the Wygods in Kentucky. She is a daughter of Storm Cat, and is out of the Kris S. mare Sweet Life. Her pedigree is impeccable, the kind that would have made her a summer-sale yearling had Wygod opted to sell her. But Wygod breeds to race, and said he has dreamed of having a Kentucky Derby runner since he first got interested in the sport in his teens.
“Anybody who races horses, the one thing they think about is the Kentucky Derby,” Wygod said.
Physically, Sweet Catomine can hold her own with the boys. She stands 16-1 or 16-2 hands tall, and is solid through her torso.
“She has tremendous substance, tremendous scope,” Wygod said.
Sweet Catomine came to her physical maturity much quicker than others of her generation, and towered over other 2-year-olds last fall at the Breeders’ Cup. But this spring, many of the males, such as Giacomo, have caught up.
Her temperament has served her in good stead.
“They really named her right,” Canani said. “She’s the sweetest filly.”
Winning Colors also was stoutly built, perhaps even more so than Sweet Catomine, but Winning Colors had a front-running style, whereas Sweet Catomine rallies. The biggest difference, however, is temperament. Winning Colors was aggressive, Sweet Catomine takes it all in. Because of her laid-back style, Sweet Catomine will have to work out a trip to rally from behind from post 2.
“She’s a big, strong filly,” said jockey Corey Nakatani, who rides Sweet Catomine. “She can handle anything. She’s as big as a colt, and she’s got the heart of a champion.”
“If you worry about them getting in trouble, you might as well not run,” Canani said. “Maybe she’ll just wink at them at the eighth pole and win by three.”
A nice bit of commentary:
Dallas Fort-Worth Star-Telegram 4/22/05
Sweet Catomine affair reminds us: Bettors are why horses race
By Gary West
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Marty Wygod forgot. So did Julio Canani. They forgot why horses race, but events over the past two weeks have jarred their memories.
Horses race for the entertainment of the people in the grandstand, for the lords and ladies, the plebians and patricians, who for a moment’s amusement invest in the outcome of one of the most democratic and traditional of sporting events. And anyone who willfully and knowingly deceives them should be severely chastened.
Wygod, in partnership with his wife, Pam, owns Sweet Catomine, the champion juvenile filly of 2004 who on April 9 finished fifth as the even-money favorite in the Santa Anita Derby. Canani trains her, or at least he did. After the Santa Anita Derby, Wygod moved Sweet Catomine to another barn and, more recently, announced her retirement.
This week, in Los Angeles Superior Court, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the people who were in the Santa Anita grandstand on April 9, specifically on behalf of those people who bet on Sweet Catomine. And they bet more than $700,000 on her in the win, place and show pool.
Naming as the defendants the Wygods, Canani and Magna Entertainment – which owns Santa Anita, as well as Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie – the suit alleges fraud. Basically, it argues that the people who bet on Sweet Catomine were deceived.
And apparently they were.
After the filly’s defeat, Wygod revealed that he had considered scratching her from the Santa Anita Derby. Seemingly intoxicated with pride, and eager to make excuses for Sweet Catomine’s performance, Wygod only exposed himself as a liar.
Sweet Catomine, as it turned out, wasn’t training up to the Santa Anita Derby like some superhorse. She had some physical problems, some issues. She had bled internally, however slightly, in a workout just prior to the race. And the California Horse Racing Board, which has filed complaints against Wygod and Canani, found that just five days prior to the Santa Anita Derby the filly was taken to a nearby clinic to be treated for pulmonary bleeding. The board discovered that the filly was signed out of the Santa Anita stable area in the middle of the night as a pony.
So now Wygod and Canani are reeling before the wrath of the bettors. What’s most astounding is Wygod’s insistence he did nothing wrong.
And from his self-indulgent perspective, he probably didn’t. But his perspective is narrow and self-absorbed and, most of all, unacceptable if horse racing is to deserve bettors’ confidence. Wygod obviously doesn’t know why horses race. He thinks they race for him, for his glory and his enrichment, for the gratification of his ego.
Many years ago, at Louisiana Downs, I became very fond of a big gray filly named Glorious Moment, who seemed to me to be uncommonly poised and intelligent. She was trained by her owner and breeder, Shirley Bussmann, an older woman who had a reputation for being independently minded, if not downright eccentric.
Well, after winning a couple allowance races, Glorious Moment was set to make her stakes debut. She was the morning line favorite and seemingly in the perfect spot, and I was effervescent with anticipation. But about an hour before the race, there came an announcement from the public address system: Glorious Moment was scratched.
Out of concern and, of course, eagerness to get the story, I hurried to the stable area to find out the reason for the scratch. Bussmann simply explained, “Something’s wrong.”
She didn’t know what. Not even the veterinarian who examined Glorious Moment had an explanation, although it would become apparent as the filly became increasingly ill in subsequent days. But even then, her owner insisted Glorious Moment wasn’t behaving normally. And then – this I’ll never forget – Bussmann said, “It wouldn’t be fair to the bettors to run her.”
She knew why horses race. They race for the entertainment of the bettors, and without the bettors, horses wouldn’t be racing, except perhaps in somebody’s back yard.
Some pictures of the super cat from yesterday’s workout Go, baby, go!
AP Photo: Sweet Catomine with Corey Nakatani up, breezing 4/3/05
AP Photo II: Sweet Catomine with Corey up
Such a beautiful big filly who is very sound and hungry!
…
Derby watch is on out west
By Bill Christine
Los Angeles Times (Tribune wire)
April 4, 2005
One rival trainer says that Sweet Catomine doesn’t have “scary” speed, and there also doesn’t seem to be much all-around fear of the champion filly in Saturday’s Santa Anita Derby.
At least 12 horses may start, which would give the race its biggest field in 24 years.
The Santa Anita Derby and the Wood Memorial, which will be run at Aqueduct on Saturday, are expected to further whittle the list of contenders for the Kentucky Derby on May 7.
The favorite in a wide-open Derby is not a horse but a trainer.
Nick Zito could have as many as five starters entered at Churchill Downs for the Triple Crown’s opening leg next month.
Two of Zito’s hopefuls, High Fly and Noble Causeway, ran 1-2 in the Florida Derby.
In California, Sweet Catomine will try to become the fourth filly – and the first one since Winning Colors in 1988 – to win the Santa Anita Derby.
“Sweet Catomine might be the best filly we’ve had since Winning Colors,” said trainer Nick Hines said, who will run Allright and Customer against Sweet Catomine in the Santa Anita Derby.
Sweet Catomine “doesn’t have Winning Colors’ scary speed,” he said.
“A lot of guys feel she has to prove it. It’s still an even playing field. There are no fear factors.”
Marty and Pam Wygod, who bred and race Sweet Catomine, are not committed to the Kentucky Derby.
“We’ll see how she does against the boys,” Marty Wygod said. “If she’s good enough, we’ll consider the Derby.”
The usual option for 3-year-old fillies is the gender-restricted Kentucky Oaks, run at Churchill Downs the day before the Derby.
<BLOCKQUOTE class=“ip-ubbcode-quote”><div class=“ip-ubbcode-quote-title”>quote:</div><div class=“ip-ubbcode-quote-content”>Originally posted by queasy:
The question is, why does he think he’s SOOOOOO important? 
</div></BLOCKQUOTE>
I couldn’t even begin to say I know the answer - or know the man - although as the current chairman of WebMD (earning $1.2M/yr) he certainly has plenty of money … even with the stock down significantly from the go-go days: WebMD shares held
He has a reputation as a hard-nosed corporate executive. This Forbes article from May 24, 2004 (see near bottom) he has been involved in multi-billion dollar deal-making before.
excerpt:
On the case: Chairman Martin Wygod and Chief Executive Holstein. Wygod, 64, knows the health care industry cold and is one of its sharpest dealmakers. In the early 1980s he paid $30 million for what became Medco Containment Services, turned it into the largest pharmacy-benefit management firm and sold it to Merck in 1993 for $6.6 billion. In 1999 he bought physician-practice software firm Medical Manager and sold it to WebMD in 2000, for $2.2 billion in stock. Wygod now owns 4% of WebMD.
Bottom line I think he a “master of the universe” type of businessman who assumed racing could be as easily controlled - when it wasn’t, he cried foul.
I’m sure folks are sick of me posting all of these articles
From the Dallas Star-Telegram 4/8 “Filly’s run will be captivating” note - site registration required
excerpt:
In 1980, trainer Leroy Jolley traveled from New York to Kentucky with a filly named Genuine Risk. She was tall, but not especially powerful or heavy. Nor was she blessed with abundant speed, but she rallied from seventh in a field of 13 to become only the second filly to win the Kentucky Derby, the first since Regret in 1915.
Crucial to her victory was the competition: It was decidedly underwhelming. And Sweet Catomine could have the same thing working for her, especially Saturday, when her foremost rivals appear to be Wilko, Don’t Get Mad and Giacomo, who are winless this year.
“I don’t see this as a year with any great colts out there,” Jolley said. “So why not [try Sweet Catomine against males]?”
Why not indeed? Sweet Catomine is the 7-5 favorite to become the fourth filly to win the Santa Anita Derby.
I was about to ask the same thing. Maybe she has a hormone problem that makes her less than fertile and fast as lightning.
Even better news is the fact that her full sister was born March 5th, and Sweet Life is booked back to Storm Cat!!
Two words for this whole thing: Unmitigated disaster.
I’m not surprised about the lawsuit, and I’m sure it will turn into a class-action. 
Anything out of Roberto can stay, even if stamina comes through the damside.
I have never understood why Roberto isn’t given more credit for his offspring. In some of the stallion registers, you can’t even search for his descendants under his name. He really has turned out to be great in the breeding shed.
<BLOCKQUOTE class=“ip-ubbcode-quote”><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>
Despite inclement weather and the likelihood of an “off” track, trainer Julio Canani said the daughter of Storm Cat owned by Mr. and Mrs. Martin Wygod will run. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Even Canani couldn’t have expected the continued downpouring that So. Cal has been hit with at Santa Anita - Sweet Catomine was scratched from the Santa Ysabel stakes this morning.
The conditions are horrible and at least one fell on the sealed track in an early race.
Sweet Catomine has one more workout scheduled before April 9th’s Santa Anita Derby (G1) against the likes of Don’t Get mad and Giacomo.
[I][Monday] She worked five furlongs in :59.60 at Santa Anita Park and Canani timed her galloping out six furlongs in 1:12.40 under regular jockey Corey Nakatani.
“She looked awesome,” Canani said. “She’s on target. We got more weight on her, and she just looked awesome. We’ll work her one more time, maybe a half-mile.”[/I]
<BLOCKQUOTE class=“ip-ubbcode-quote”><div class=“ip-ubbcode-quote-title”>quote:</div><div class=“ip-ubbcode-quote-content”>Originally posted by drifting cloud:
I’m not surprised about the lawsuit, and I’m sure it will turn into a class-action. </div></BLOCKQUOTE>
Yes, it is a class-action lawsuit
Excerpt:
“We’re asking for Santa Anita and Mr. Wygod to make all of those persons whole again who bet on Sweet Catomine by returning the money that was bet and the money that was made by Santa Anita,” [LA Attorney Stephen] Bernard said.
“It will be easy to determine that because the figures are a matter of public record.”
There was more than $700,000 bet on Sweet Catomine in win, place and show pools combined.
“Hopefully this kind of dollar damage will stop the kind of anarchy that goes on at Santa Anita and other tracks. . . . It’s interesting that because the race was so prominent and the circumstances so questionable it wasn’t going to be left like it might have in so many similar instances before,” Bernard said.
>> additional <<
San Diego Union-Tribune 4/20 - Associated Press
excerpt:
A hearing for Wygod and the van driver is scheduled for Saturday at Hollywood Park.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Wygod said.
“There’s no merit to the suit whatsoever,” Wygod said. “I intend to defend it and I hate ambulance chasers.”
