July Fourth is University of Maine Day at Bangor Raceway; Special Mare to be Presented Before Second Race
Contact: Nonni Daly at (207) 827-8386
ORONO — Bangor Raceway will host its traditional “University of Maine Day” on July 4th and will feature retrained racehorses from the UMaine program.
Each of the post parades will be marshaled by two UMares who are retired racehorses in the retraining program at UMaine. The five-year-old BEST OF PLANS who raced at Scarborough but couldn’t post competitive times has gone through the retraining program and is now owned, as of July 1st and ridden by Rebecca Powers. She is a junior equine business management major and the current president of the UMaine Equestrian Team. She also serves as the Assistant Race Secretary at Bangor Raceway and is working on a Track Management Internship at the raceway this summer and fall.
Of interest is that BEST OF PLANS underwent life-threatening colic surgery last December and has come back from that remarkably well and doesn’t show any problems as a result. Rebecca is the young woman who was responsible for rescuing the horse, SOLE SURVIVOR, who escaped his trailer in Newport and ran loose on the Interstate before finding his way to the Triangle area and the local MacDonalds.
Riding seven-year-old BELLE’S RADIANT STAR will be senior Animal and Veterinary Science major, Lizz Carpenter. This mare raced at Bangor in 2004 before a leg injury brought her career to an end. Both horses and riders will marshal all of the races on the July Fourth card.
Of special interest will be the lead marshal for the second race. To show the versatility of the Standardbred breed and how well these horses can leave the track and take on a pleasure and performance life, we will ask 30-year-old HONEST APPRAISAL to lead the post parade with the UMaine riders. She will be walked by her owner and trainer, Melissa Spencer of Alton, who bought her off the Bangor Raceway track after her race career, which spanned the 1981-1983 seasons and trained her as a dressage horse. This wonderful mare attained silver medal status at Second Level Dressage, which is an incredible achievement for any breed, but even more remarkable for a gaited horse like the Standardbred. Known as “MUFFIN”, she may be the first Standardbred in the country to have accomplished this feat — which she did in competition in the early 1990s.
Watching these three horses will, we hope, imprint in track fans’ minds that “After the Finish Line — They Are NOT Finished!”, which is a working motto of the retraining program at the University of Maine.