The Daily Feather — The 300th Minute
Are you gussying up for the 300th minute? This Saturday marks the 150th anniversary of the most exciting two minutes in U.S. sports. In 1875, Meriweather Lewis Clark Jr. threw open the gates in Louisville, Kentucky, inaugurating the longest continually running sporting event in America. Occupying 175 acres, he honored the giftee of the land, Abigail Churchill, a.k.a. Mom, by naming the racetrack Churchill Downs, “Home of the Kentucky Derby. ” Here, Thoroughbred horse racing is conducted at three race meets in the Spring, September, and Fall. The barns behind the one-mile dirt, oval racetrack house more than 1,400 horses each year. The most notable addition to the Downs’ iconic grandstand and clubhouse that accommodate more than 165,000 racing fans on Derby Day is The Big Board – the world’s largest 4k video screen. According to CBS Sports, the favorite to win this year’s Running of the Roses is Fierceness, who is saddled by two-time Kentucky Derby-winning trainer Todd Pletcher. Post time on Saturday is 6:57 p.m. ET.
Between now and then, there’s a trading week replete with earnings of companies that start with ‘A,’ including Apple and Amazon, manufacturing reports from around the globe, and April’s U.S. employment report. Oh, and smack dab in the middle is a Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Will Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell pull an impromptu dot plot out at the podium as he did last year, suggesting three rate hikes have been whittled down to two?
Before the parlor game of parsing Powell commences, though, we must survive what’s left of the April layoff showers that have brought anything but May flowers for more U.S. workers than the nearly 104,000 who got the ax in January.