It’s not like anyone was really surprised. The whispers started a few years ago, when all of sudden trainer Jason Servis couldn’t lose. According to Equibase, his win percentage in 2015 was 21%; in 2016, it jumped to 27%. Then it was 29%, then 32%. Anyone who was paying even a little attention had to…
The child, sitting down with the old man close behind … had been thinking how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them… Charles Dickens certainly got that one right. In The Olde Curiosity Shop, the orphaned adolescent Nell…
During the week before the Florida Derby, Gulfstream Park is used to being the center of attention. The Grade 1 Kentucky Derby prep is one of the key dates on the national racing calendar, and one of the two biggest days at the Hallandale track. Usually, the attention of the turf media is turned squarely…
On Thursday at Saratoga, seven-year-old All The Way Jose will make his fourth start of the year in the Grade 1 New York Turf Writers Cup Handicap. The former flat runner is 8-1 on the morning line, and looking for his first win at the Spa since an allowance race in 2014 when he was…
A few days ago, I got a message from a Twitter follower that I didn’t know was a racing fan. She said that she’d always been a racing fan and that her sister owns horses, and she’d come up from Brooklyn to Saratoga for the races. She was here on a day on which one…
On the day that last week’s column was published, the column in which I raised questions about the accuracy, timeliness, and consistency of the information in the New York State Gaming Commission’s database of equine injuries, I received an e-mail from the Commission, correcting my assertion that thefatality report from the Saratoga 2014 meeting had…
Horse racing found itself in the spotlight on Saturday afternoon but not quite in the way that it wanted to. The day was supposed to be about the 141st running of the Preakness Stakes, about the undefeated Nyquist trying to keep his record intact, about the possibility of another Triple Crown run at Belmont in…
Ten years ago this week, the racing world watched in horror as shortly after the start of the Preakness Stakes, jockey Edgar Prado pulled Barbaro up with a catastrophic injury to his right hind leg. Stricken with a shattered leg that in almost any other case would have led to immediate euthanasia, Barbaro was transported…
In 2006, The (U.S.) Jockey Club and the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation held the first Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit. Originally biannual, the summit now takes place yearly, featuring presentations on racetrack health and safety issues involving both horses and the people who work with them. Held in Lexington, Kentucky, the reach of…
To some observers, the most damning element of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) video of trainer Steve Asmussen’s barns is that it reveals nothing that violates racing’s medication rules. That video, released in March and covered by The New York Times, purported to show what really goes on behind the scenes of a…
Brooklyn Backstretch 