Twenty-nine class members attended, with about an equal number of partners, family members, friends and entertainers. This time we remembered to get a group photo of the attending class members:
Left to right: Jim Nix, Andy Butz, John Nixdorff, Tom Mineo, Jim Timbie, David Bonnett, Terry Beaty, Carl Eastwick, Frank Ward, Rick Bowers, Jack Burke, Frank Nuessle, Kit Mill (at Center, in his crouch), Ted Bent, Stu Steingold, Ned Groth, Nelson Hendler, John Hart, Bert Kerstetter, John Lumpkin, Walt Bliss, Bill Leahy, Ernie Cruikshank, Bill Eddy, Fred Talcott, Jack Chidester, Dave Sonnenberg, Stas Maliszewski. (Kearney Shanahan arrived a few minutes after this photo was taken.)
The races themselves this year featured an unusually high rate of accidents. We didn’t stay for the fourth race (it was delayed a long time by the misadventures in earlier races), but in the three races we did witness, a total of 23 horses started, and only 10 finished. The rest fell, pulled up, or went off the course. No horses were hurt badly (as far as we could see), but two jockeys were taken away in ambulances. Steeplechase is not a sport for the faint-hearted. Warning: the slide show of the third race has action shots of horses falling, which the squeamish might want to avoid.
Several adverse events occurred where we couldn’t see them. About half of the jumps on the course are out of sight from our observation point, behind the Griswold farm’s rolling hills. In the first race (the Grand National), #6, Storm Team, led from the start, but when the horses cleared the 12th fence, he and the horses that had been in second and third place at the 9th jump were no longer in the race. I couldn’t photograph it because of the terrain and the crowd, but apparently at the 11th jump, Storm Team shied (refused to jump) and veered in front of the next two horses, taking all three out of action.
Something similar happened in the second race, the Maiden Timber. Late in the race, out of sight of the crowd, four horses fell or pulled up. A couple of individual other horses also fell at jumps where we couldn’t see it happen, in the second and third races. However, in the third race, the Benjamin Murray Memorial Cup, where six of the eight starters did not finish, three horses fell in range of my camera. Those mishaps were crucial to the race outcome, so they are included in the slide show. The captions tell the stories.
A note on photo quality: It was a beautiful day with bright sunshine, which creates two banes for a photographer: Sunglasses, and shadows. Almost everyone wore shades and many also wore hats, casting their faces in shadows. Many pictures have both brightly lit subjects and deep shadows. I’ve done what I could with my photo editing software to mitigate the problems, but many of the shots are either still too contrasty, or seem washed out because contrast has been minimized. And in far too many cases, the only shots I have of someone show them wearing dark glasses. Those gripes notwithstanding, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this photographic record of The Races 2026.
Photos of Classmates & Friends and of the Grand National Race are included. Photos from the three other races will be added at a future time.
Photo credits: Most pictures by Ned Groth and John Lumplin. All captions by Ned. Unless otherwise noted in the caption, Ned gets credit/blame for the images.
