Pimlico

Sitting in front of a microphone Friday morning, Rosie Napravnik fielded questions about her first race at Pimlico Race Course while donning a hat from her new sponsor, Snickers Bites. For the 25-year-old jockey, it was a fitting juxtaposition, as she's risen to fame after she got her start as a jockey here in 2005. Now, Napravnik returns to race in Pimlico's biggest event on the course where she won her first start as a jockey. She will become the third female to ride in the Preakness and can become the first to win it, but that's not her motivation.

Roaming the streets that encircle Pimlico Race Course , I discovered so many places that I had trouble going back to the same locale twice. Outer Northwest Baltimore is a fascinating, at times geographically bewildering, place. When the Maryland Jockey Club members built Pimlico, they must have been thinking big and distant. It was a gallop from Druid Hill Park, and if you didn't own a carriage, you would have needed a ticket on the Western Maryland Railway to spend a day at the races.

Kentucky Derby winner Orb is the even-money favorite for the Preakness, so the biggest topics leading up to the weekend have, obviously, been about his chances and how to beat him on Saturday. “The jockey was just here," Mylute jockey Rosie Napravnik, the fiery 25-year-old, shot back. "Ask him.” Though Napravnik eventually talked quite a bit about her thoughts on Orb and her possible strategies coming out of the gate -- Orb drew post-position No. 1, while Mylute is at No. 5 -- she has her own worries about Mylute.

Harford County has had many big-time sports moments in its glorious history. Perhaps none were bigger, however, than the one that happened 30 years ago this week. That's when Harford County's own Deputed Testamony won the 1983 Preakness, bringing home the second of the three jewels of the Triple Crown of thoroughbred horse racing contested each year. The Triple Crown, for horse racing novices, is the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday in May, the Preakness down the road at Pimlico in Baltimore on the third Saturday in May and the Belmont Park in Elmont, N.Y., on Long Island three Saturdays later.

In a pair of low-slung green stables manned by security guards and watched by 24-hour surveillance cameras, a pack of brawny young horses will be monitored, poked and assessed down to the blood in their veins. The horses set to race in the 138th Preakness are to be kept under a microscope from their arrival at Pimlico Race Course until they burst from their starting gates Saturday — not only to avoid injury but also scandal. "It's become more sophisticated," said David Zipf, 72, the Maryland Racing Commission's longtime chief veterinarian for thoroughbred racing.

The top local entrant for Friday's 89th running of the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico took one wrong step on Thursday and had to be scratched. Walkwithapurpose, a Maryland-bred owned by Sagamore Farm in Glyndon, was expected to be one of the top contenders in the $500,000 Grade II race run at a mile and one-eighth for 3-year-old-fillies. Thursday afternoon, however, the Sagamore Farm filly had to drop out of the race after bruising her foot earlier in the day during her final gallop on the track at Pimlico in preparation for Friday's race.

Stuart Janney III, the co-owner of even-money Preakness favorite Orb, arrived at Pimlico Race Course on Thursday morning to watch the colt once again have an easy trip around the track and then go through his morning routine. Janney, the chairman of the Bessemer Trust, traveled earlier in the week and came back to Baltimore from New York, where the company is headquartered, last night. He said he's pleased with how Orb has progressed after winning the Kentucky Derby, and has warm memories of spending mornings during Preakness week at the track 20 minutes from his Butler home.

Much like the nickname “Shug,” Claude R. McGaughey III's plans after college were a mystery to him. McGaughey, who trains Kentucky Derby winner and Preakness favorite Orb, was a student at the University of Mississippi's business school as the Vietnam War was going on and wasn't enjoying it - he was "piddling around," as he called it. Drawing a high draft number in the 1969 draft, McGaughey decided to leave school. The only way his parents would allow him to, though, was if he got a job. McGaughey reached out to a friend who owned several horses at Keeneland in Lexington for work.

D. Wayne Lukas, the Hall of Fame trainer, has started 37 horses in the Preakness. He expects to have three more - Will Take Charge, Oxbow and Titletown Five - go to the post Saturday for the 138th running of the middle jewel of the Triple Crown. Does Lukas like Pimlico? Indeed he does. "I do like it here. We've only missed two, maybe only one in the last 33 years," Lukas said as he waited to accompany one of his horses to the track Wednesday morning. Standing just outside the stakes barn, Lukas was outfitted in his usual jeans, chaps, boots and spurs and a 10-gallon hat. Waiting patiently nearby was his stable pony Diamond, a reminder that while Lukas may have revolutionized the sport of horse racing with some of his methods, he's still a throwback when it comes to others.

A few low, indecipherable noises escaped from the table where Shug McGaughey, trainer of even-money Preakness favorite Orb, sat during the post-position draw Wednesday. The horse had drawn the dreaded No. 1 gate, meaning eight horses will be closing him in as they race toward the shortest path to the first turn. McGaughey, though, was not among those who thought this meant anything significant. “Some people groaned,” he said. “I didn't groan.” McGaughey acknowledged a preference to start on the outside of the field - where both the jockey and horse can watch the field open up - but said he thought drawing the rail simply didn't matter in a nine-horse field running over a mile and three-sixteenths.