On June 1, the New York-bred filly Lovely Syn kept her spotless race record intact with a 10-length front-running score in the Bouwerie Stakes at Belmont Park. She’d won her four races by a combined margin of nearly 30 lengths. “We’re having so much fun racing her,” said her owner Michael Parisi after the race,…
“Mr. Morrissey deserves great credit for the excellent manner in which the whole detail of his attractive entertainment is managed.” So wrote an approving reporter in the Aug. 4, 1863, edition of the Daily Saratogian, following the first day of the inaugural racing meet in the village of Saratoga Springs. Visitors to the little track…
More than 10 years ago, artist/writer/curator Rhonda Lieberman was at an art installation by James Turrell at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens. It was, said the East Village resident, all about light and emptiness, and about mediating environments. “It was an empty room, and the ceiling had been…
On Saturday at 1 p.m., the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame and handicapper Tom Amello are teaming up to help Saratoga-area racing fans brush up on their handicapping skills before the meet opens on Friday, July 19. A former host of Capital OTB’s “Trackfacts” (unfortunately cancelled in the last year by the…
This month’s edition of sexism in sports is brought to you by Insider Louisville, the BBC, Hollywood Park, and the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. Back in April, Insider Louisville published what was meant, according to the author, to be a paean to the female turf writer, an admiring salute to the women on the Churchill Downs backstretch…
Last fall, Anna Hieronimus and Elise Kornack were all set to open their new restaurant/yoga studio, on a quiet, beautiful street in Carroll Gardens, awaiting only the final permit from the city. The Fire Department was scheduled to do the final inspections on October 29, but instead of the visit they expected, they got, instead,…
In June of 1913, the racing world slowly began to return to normal, or at least to a new normal, one in which bookmakers were banned and bets were made furtively, as customers tried to figure out how they could wager without running afoul of the law. In further good news for racing, within weeks…
Just about a year ago, Sagamore Farm was wrestling with the unexpected loss of its star three-year-old filly. In a freak training accident at the farm, Millionreasonswhy, the winner of the 2011 Matron (gr. II), crashed through a rail and died of internal injuries. From six starts, she had won three times and never finished…
“There are no second acts,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “in American lives.” If the relationship between Sam-Son Farm and Malcolm Pierce is any indication, though, Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted words do not, it seems, apply to Canadians. In 1988, when Sam-Son won the first of the farm’s five Queen’s Plates, Pierce worked at the farm as an…
Earlier this month, when horses gathered in the paddock at Belmont Park before heading to the track for the Belmont Stakes, they walked around an iconic white pine tree, thought to be a part of the estate on which the racetrack was constructed in 1905. Estimated to be nearly 200 years old, the tree was…
Brooklyn Backstretch 