Paddock

Tear it down. Fix it up. Keep it here. Move it there. Many at Pimlico Race Course Saturday, from celebrated trainers to $2 bettors, offered thoughts of what to do with Old Hilltop, the methuselan home of the 138 t h Preakness Stakes. The Maryland Jockey Club, which owns the track, has agreed to renovate both Pimlico and Laurel Park with a share of the state's slots revenue - an estimated $112 million in matching funds, if the organization ponies up the equivalent.

They likely won't recognize each other Saturday as they go to the gate for the 138th Preakness. Orb, the Kentucky Derby winner, and Departing, a horse some believe could be the only one capable of ending this year's Triple Crown chase in Baltimore, will be thinking of nothing but running. They will be two of nine horses trying to get to the front. Before they ever officially became racehorses, they were just two of eight horses in a field on the Kentucky farm where they were born.

Friday evening, Lina Basquette celebrated her 84th birthday at home in Wheeling, W. Va. On Saturday, she drove alone to Baltimore --the rain dragged out the trip to seven hours --in her 1991 red Chevy Cavalier. She spent Sunday at the Baltimore County Kennel Club's 55th show, judging classes of Akitas, Great Pyrenees, Komondors, giant Schnauzers, bull mastiffs, Samoyeds and Portuguese Water Dogs -- no, she begs your pardon, she judged Portuguese Water Dogs last week at a show in Hagerstown.

The woman dangling a fish in front of an obedient dolphin at the National Aquarium also might be training your next winner at Pimlico.Trish Phelps, 25, is Baltimore's "Galloping Mammalogist," a former bio-psychology major at UMBC whose dual careers combine her talents with her love of animals.By dawn, Phelps exercises thoroughbreds at Laurel Park, assisting trainer Graham Motion as an exercise rider.She guides the horses through their morning calisthenics, harnessing their desire to run into a systematic, rhythmic training pattern that not only makes them responsive to their riders, but keeps them competitive enough to want to reach the finish line first.

Behind a door just off the paddock area of Pimlico Race Course , several jockeys are prepping for the day's races. They're handicapping the competition, comparing notes on horses and, in at least one case, going through a yoga sequence: reaching back to pull one leg high overhead in the Dancer's Pose, touching nose to knee for the Pyramid. Perhaps this is also happening in the men's locker room, but there's decidedly more stretching space here where the female jockeys suit up, shower and await their calls to the track.

Nicole Stall boarded the first plane to Maryland she could catch when she heard of Benjamin Boniface's death last June. She was there to grieve the death of a boy she had known since his birth. But also to work. In the days after the 20-year-old's death in an early-morning car accident on the farm, she went to the barns where she had fallen in love with horses as a teenager. “I was completely out of it,” said William K. Boniface, known to most as Billy. “She just went out to the stallion barn, kept it running.

Real Quiet, who shocked many horsemen during his life as he moved his skinny, imperfect body from the starting gate into the winner's circle in five Grade I races, including the 1998 Kentucky Derby and Preakness, shocked the horse world again Monday when he died after a fall. Real Quiet, 15, was in his paddock at Penn Ridge Farms near Harrisburg, Pa., when he somehow fell on his left shoulder. A necropsy at New Bolton showed he fell so hard that he drove his shoulder into his neck, fracturing five cervical vertebrae, according to Mike Jester, owner of Penn Ridge Farm and majority shareholder and manager of the syndicate that owned the stallion.

Union City's final race ended in a horse ambulance parked on a dusty lot by a maintenance shop some 100 yards from the starting gate of the 118th Preakness Stakes.Inside the white van, a covered 20-foot metal stall, Dr. Dan Dreyfuss prepared the lethal injection that quickly would extinguish the life of the 3-year-old colt, whose right front ankle was bent, broken and bloody. The veterinarian emptied a 100 cc bottle of sodium pentabarbitol into three syringes. He then took a needle and stuck it into the horse's neck, on the left side, finding the jugular vein.

Raleigh Burroughs is a funny man, short and bespectacled, who has made a living making wisecracks and telling witty anecdotes about horse racing.He is sort of a cross between a Bennet Cerf and George Burns of the backstretch, except he's not quite as old as Burns and doesn't smoke cigars.Burroughs made one of his rare appearances at Laurel this weekend. Rare for a good reason. He's 90, and doesn't stray much anymore from his retirement home in Florida.Ostensibly, he was here to present the trophy in a race with a long-winded name -- the Maryland Racing Writers' Handicap, which vies with the Japan Racing Association Handicap for the breadth of its title.

Two years ago, a Harford County developer built an equestrian training facility for show horses and riders in the middle of a 273-acre tract in the Pylesville area.Now, that equestrian center -- with its indoor riding arena, box stalls, show ring, training track and practice ring -- is about to become the centerpiece of a new housing development for horse enthusiasts."It's going to be a beautiful community with white fences, pretty horses and nice houses," said Donald Wilson, a partner in Wilson Properties.