Carol Cendeno, winner of the Philly Park Female Jockey Challenge (EBarnes624)

While you can find plenty of accounts of Careless Jewel’s triumphant performance in the Cotillion at Philly Park, you’ll have to look a little harder to find anything about the other jewel at Philly Park on Saturday, the first annual Female Jockey Challenge.

In fact, the only thing I’ve found about it outside of Female on the Horse, Flickr and Live Journal was an article at Philly.com by Dick Jerardi:

All 11 races on the card will be for fillies and mares. Races 1, 2, 4 and 8 will feature only female riders in a jockeys challenge. The track will donate $25,000 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a breast-cancer awareness organization.

Had I not seen this great photo set at Flickr by way of Raceday360 this morning I would have forgotten about it completely, apparently like everyone else! GbG fav Carol Cendeno won 3 of the 4 challenge races to take this year’s title.

From what I can tell jockeys Tammi Piermarini, Janice Blake-Baeza, Ashton Fitzpatrick, Jill Jellison, Jenna Joubert, Carol Cedeno , Tara Hemmings, Shannon Uske, Joanne McDaid, Jackie Davis, Anna Napravnik and Maylan Studart competed in the challenge. That’s quite a formidable group!

While it’s certainly hard to compete with 5 G1 races carded at Belmont in the height of Breeders’ Cup prep season, a little coverage would have been nice. Apologies if there was some coverage that I missed (please leave the link in the comments!), my online grazing time has been a touch diminished these days.

It looked like a lovely day, complete with autograph signing, bringing home long shots and plenty of thumbs up. As it turns out, it isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, Hoosier Park used to do a Female Jockey Challenge, and in fact still might, unless they’ve radically changed their concept of “Ladies Day” in recent years.

From the 2007 Hoosier Female Jockey Challenge:

Here’s hoping that next year will be a little more widely covered!