This Friday at Saratoga Race Course will see the last of the 13 stakes races carded this summer for horses bred or sired in New York. Saratoga Showcase Day was added to the racing calendar in 2014 and scheduled for Travers weekend, increasing the visibility of the state’s breeding program on the biggest racing weekend of the summer.

Earlier this summer, the New York Racing Association (NYRA) carded something of a mini-showcase day on Aug. 12, offering four New York-bred stakes races worth $125,000 each. Three of those four races had been fixtures at Saratoga for years, and this year, NYRA, New York Thoroughbred Breeders (NYTB), and the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (NYTHA) consolidated them to kick off a weekend that also included the NYTB annual awards dinner and the two sessions of the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale of preferred New York-bred yearlings.

Traditionally held in Saratoga Springs in April, the awards ceremony this year honored some of the very horses that had run earlier in the day and offered updates on the pedigrees of the yearlings that would be sold two days later. In action Friday will be another four New York-bred champions, including a millionaire that broke his maiden at Saratoga in 2018.