Looking Back to Shady Veil (07/06/10)

Posted Tuesday July 6, 2010

                                                                        By Mike Paradise

  This is another in a weekly feature exclusively on www.harnessillinois.com. Every week I’ll post a least one “Looking Back feature. Mostly they’ll be of the great horses who have competed in our state through the years. At times they’ll be pictures from the winner’s circle, special celebrations, and in some cases old memorable race track scenes. Some of these photos haven’t been printed or posted in decades . . . others have never been printed at all.
  
  Just by right clicking your computer mouse, going to “Save Picture As”, you can make your own jpeg copy of any Looking Back photo posted. You can e-mail them and share with a friend or maybe start your own computer file of “Looking Back” memories.

                                                            Looking Back

                                                                                SHADY VEIL
   
  Only one of three horses ever to capture a Super Night Championship at both Sportsman’s Park and Balmoral Park (Big Tom and Ohyouprettyhthing were the others) and the only one to do it with two different drivers. Shady Veil is shown here winning the $100,000 Ann Vonian Championship with Jim Curran at her lines in 1997 the last racing season at Sportsman’s Park. One year later she repeated in the same state-bred stake championship at age of six with Randy Jacobs driving at the first Super Night hosted by Balmoral Park.

  Owned and bred by Maria Little and trained by Dave Isaacs, this daughter of Masquerede didn’t make it to the race track until two weeks before her fifth birthday, finishing off the board at Maywood Park in mid-December of 1996. However, she would become the Queen of Chicago Circuit the following season.

  She won three races in January of ’97 at Hawthorne, took four more at Maywood in March and April, and then a captured trio of starts at Balmoral in the spring. Then it was off to Sportsman’s Park where she won her first pair there in “Winner’s Over competition,” extending her winning streak to seven in a row. In July she swept through their Golden Miss stake elimination and final, and did the same in September in the Ann Vonian on Super Night.

 Shady Veil ended her storybook 1997 season with 18 wins, 3 seconds and 2 thirds in 28 starts and amassed $141,472 in earnings. The gutty mare added another $90,005 to her card in 1998 and ended her career in 1999 with a mark of 1:52.3 taken at Balmoral that July.

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