Perri, Ransom and Chee will shout out the times and she’ll record the information next to the horse’s name, and later officially enter the times into a database. Yvonne Kaiser jots down the name of every thoroughbred that’s working out on a spread sheet as they are relayed to the booth by Jimmy Sutherland, who is stationed at the entrance of the track. Suddenly, the voice on the other end of the walkie-talkie declares that King and His Court and top Oaks contender Enstone would be hitting the track for their final four-furlong workouts to prepare for this weekend’s races. “The gambling on a horse is a lot like gambling in the stock market.” He didn’t like the work much, but loved the track - there had to be a better way for him to work in horse racing, he remembers thinking at the time. Weekends were spent with his family at the track and as a teenager, he would bike from his home at Keele and Finch to hot-walk horses on the backstretch. It would seem Perri was destined for this line of work - he was nearly born at Woodbine, his parents at the races the afternoon his mother gave birth to him. Accurate workout times are key to handicapping, especially for unraced horses, as they give an indication of a horse’s development and speed. Since horse racing is rooted in gambling - wagering money feeds the purse prizes - Perri’s jobs as clocker and oddsmaker are vital to the sport. “There’s a lot of buzz around the racetrack about this horse,” he said of Holy Helena, who shipped in from New York to race in the Oaks.
WOODBINE CLOCKER REPORT TRIAL
King and His Court is Perri’s overwhelming pick for the Plate Trial Stakes at 9-5, while he gives Holy Helena more generous 3-1 odds as the favourite for the Oaks, the pre-eminent race for 3-year-old fillies in Canada. Later, the soft-spoken and personable 46-year-old will parse reams of past performance data, taking into consideration what he has seen in the mornings and set the morning-line odds for upcoming races, including Sunday’s Woodbine Oaks and Plate Trial Stakes, the prep for the Queen’s Plate on July 2. On this day, they record 196 horses over a four-hour span. High up on the sixth floor of the track’s building, Perri, Mark Ransom and Milton Chee double-fist Timex Triathlon stopwatches, often tracking multiple horses at once. Perri’s duties begin before dawn, when he and his staff of six time every morning workout that prepares horses for races. To untrained eyes and ears, the atmosphere has the frenzy of a hospital emergency room: The constant beeping of stopwatches, the non-stop back and forth of racetrack parlance, and the steady stream of racehorses going in all directions around the track.įor Woodbine Racetrack’s head clocker and oddsmaker Ernie Perri and his crew, it is just an average day.
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