And they are off…

I Want Revenge on the outside. Strike the Gold on the inside. Casual Eyes third and the others are dropping back.

And here’s Thunder Gulch with some speed; he’s making his way forward. Now it’s Real Quiet on the outside with Join in the Dance farther back down the rail.

“When I was little, I used to get together with my friends and make lists of possible horse names,” Curren Katz told me on the phone last week. A friend of a friend and a recent NYU graduate, who now does brain imaging research, she grew up around horses and started riding “basically when I was born.”

“I think I wanted to name one Shades of Grey and another Nirvana; they were on the list.” She ended up going with Dot Com, who was Toughy in the barn.

“I was 10 years old.”

And down the stretch they come. Sea Hero charging up the middle but Wild Gale is right there. Captain Canada racing Silver Charm; they are neck and neck. Smarty Jones a challenge on the inside from Rock Hard Ten. He lets it out a notch. Smarty Jones now with a four-length lead.

The first horse she competed with came with the name Steele Thinking. “I was competing in hunter/jumper horse shows on the A circuit. Steele Thinking was gray and called Cinder in the barn.

She sold Steele Thinking when she got too tall to ride him.

“It was sad,” she says, “but kind of just the way it goes. They aren’t, when you’re competing on that level, just pets.”

Finding a new horse can be hard, she tells me. “It’s not uncommon to be trying different horses, maybe a couple times each, at horse shows, before buying one.”

She almost bought a horse once called Whataboutme, Phillip in the barn. She really liked him and “the name Phillip fit. He was polite and well-behaved; it suited him.”

But, unfortunately, the vet found a potential problem with Phillip’s health so she didn’t buy him. “He was relatively famous in that world. Later, the owner had another horse who she named Enoughaboutyou. I thought that was funny.”

“I eventually settled on Blame it on Rio, Rio in the barn. He was from Brazil and was named after that movie.”

“No two race horses can have the same name,” Julie Kruger tells me. Her family has owned 27 horses over the years and she has competed in hunter/jumper horse shows as well. “So, you get these really crazy names like Refrigerator, Pole on the Side and Lucky Times.

“Race horses have to be registered with The Jockey Club.”

The Jockey Club’s website lists many rules for naming a horse: no more than 18 letters, no names made up entirely of initials (C.O.D., F.O.C.), no names clearly having commercial, artistic or creative significance, no names of living people without their written permission, no names that are suggestive, vulgar or obscene and on and on.

“Do you have a favorite?” I ask Julie.

She pauses, “Nobleman, but I think that’s just because I liked the horse.”

“He was a great horse,” her mom, Susan, chimes in from the background. I’m on speakerphone and they are on their way to dinner.

“It’s a billion-dollar industry in New Jersey [where they live]. A good horse goes anywhere from 250 to 300.” She pauses. “Thousand.”

“They start to devalue immediately. If you buy a decent horse for $150,000 and then cash out a few years later for $40,000, you are doing pretty well. It’s an expensive hobby/sport,” she tells me. “But, it’s not about the money.”

“What would you name a horse if you had one right now?” I ask Curren.

She pauses. “I don’t know, I haven’t thought about this is awhile. I’d probably go with something neuroscience related.”

“How about Brain Imaging Research, that sounds like a good horse name.” I offer.

“Eh,” she doesn’t agree.

“I remember when my brother was five; he had a pony and every day it seemed like it had a new name. He could never settle on anything,” she tells me.

“My brother wasn’t competing, so we all went along with it. It was just like ‘Well, what’s his name today?’”

I’m still not sure that Brain Imaging Research is a bad name for a horse, but maybe tomorrow, I’ll change my mind.

- Zac Stuart-Pontier