The track announced that live racing is scheduled to resume on Wednesday, and the five races that filled for Tuesday will be on Wednesday's card. (The track also announced that Elite Alex, a son of Afleet Alex who had been on the Derby trail, trained by Tim Ritchey, is entered in a $41,000 allowance race Wednesday at Delaware Park.)
What does it say about the state of that industry when the favored track of the new Kentucky Derby-winning trainer, Graham Motion, and home to other top trainers such as Ritchey and Larry Jones, can't fill its races?
Women's World Cup team
Plenty of local connections on the 2011 team announced Monday, including four Independence players, one Penn State alum, former Philadelphia defender Heather Mitts and midfielder Carli Lloyd of Delran.
A decent World Cup will cement Lloyd's place as the best women's soccer player ever produced in this area. In women's soccer, the World Cup and the Olympics are pretty much on equal footing, with the best players and teams going to both. Lloyd already has the winning goal in the gold-medal Olympic game in Beijing. She's also the U.S. team's leading scorer this season.
When I talked to Lloyd once, just before the Beijing Olympics, what impressed me most was her willingness to admit she wasn't ready for the national-team level when she first got there. She began working out with a man named James Galanis in South Jersey.
"I wasn't fit," Lloyd said in 2008, just before the Beijing Olympics. "He turned me into a machine. It's funny looking back. Five years ago, I could never run long distances. He started out with a 15-minute run. I said, 'This is long.' I got up to an hour and a half."
So five years before Lloyd scored the goal of her life, she believed she couldn't run as long as it took to play a soccer game. She'd always been a star, the all-time leading scorer at Rutgers and a two-time South Jersey Inquirer high school player of the year. But, she said, "I relied a lot on my skills."
Once Lloyd figured out what she needed to take her game to another level, she's been there ever since. (Another thing she learned: Stay hydrated. Lloyd said she tries to always have a bottle of water with her.)
Where in the world is . . .
Dwayne Jones? The former St. Joseph's center, who left Hawk Hill a year early for the NBA, just left a professional club in China to sign with a team in Puerto Rico. Jones had played for Minnesota, Boston and Cleveland before going abroad, to Turkey and then Serbia. Last spring, Jones signed on for four games with the Phoenix Suns.
Contact staff writer Mike Jensen at 215-854-4489 or mjensen@phillynews.com.
