Following a wildly successful Thoroughbred yearling sale at Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky last month, the English auction company Tattersalls is hoping for similar exuberance at its yearling sale this week. As was the case here, the European market for expensive racehorses took a hit over the last five years, but a combination of factors, not…
By all accounts, the pun in Miss Behaviour’s name is not an apt one. “Over in the barn this morning,” said one of her owners, Cal MacWilliam, in the winner’s circle at Belmont Park last Sunday, “she was absolutely calm, lying down, sleeping.” The same could not be said of MacWilliam, his partner Neil Teitelbaum,…
Trainer Leah Gyarmati gave up an academic career for a life at the racetrack, so it is, perhaps, a little ironic that the filly who brought her her first graded stakes victory is named Sweet Reason. Gyarmati had an off-again, on-again relationship with reason earlier in her life, wrestling with the decision to stay in…
“Spectacular.” That was the word the Keeneland Association used to describe the results of its Thoroughbred yearling sales last month. The 12-day sale started with a bang, with four horses selling for at least $1 million on the first day; by the time it was over, the sale price for 18 yearlings had reached seven…
In April of 2010, Edward Stanco sent his mare Storm Dixie to Kentucky to be bred for the first time. He’d purchased her for $67,000 in 2006, and after she won just once in 10 starts, he decided, after years in the racing business, to take a shot at breeding a horse. The mating didn’t…
On September 13, less than two weeks after the end of this year’s Thoroughbred meeting at Saratoga Race Course, the racing world was stunned to learn that five priceless, historic trophies had been stolen from the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. In a year that saw the town celebrate the sesquicentennial of…
The International Conference on the Health, Safety, and Welfare of Jockeys lived up to its name at Monmouth Park on September 13 and 14, with representatives from South America, England, Ireland, Australia, France, and Germany. And a few people from the United States — but only a few — showed up, too. “I don’t understand…
When T. Paul Bulmahn was a little boy, his mother offered him an incentive for doing a good job with his family’s sharecropping chores on an Indiana farm. If he raked and hoed and planted well, she said, he could climb over the fence and hang out with the draft horses next door. “I loved…
People leave the horse racing business for all kinds of reasons. It can be dangerous work. It’s tough to make a living. In most cases, they end up in work that’s a little safer, a little more stable than what they did on the racetrack. But not if you’re Iona Craig, who went from a life…
In his six years on the racetrack, Stud Muffin showed a definite predilection for distance: the bulk of his 14 lifetime victories came at a mile and or more, with the gray guy coming from off the pace, often eking out a win, sometimes winning by a length or so. He seldom won by more…
Brooklyn Backstretch 