There’s never a good time for a crisis, but it’s hard to imagine a less convenient time for Covid-19 to have hit the New York racing and breeding industries than mid-March. Mares were foaling and being bred; high-stakes races were on the calendar at Aqueduct; and the popular sales for two-year-olds in training were hitting…
JIM BOND HAS BEEN TRAINING horses for 40 years. He’s won dozens of graded stakes races, including the Whitney Handicap, the Travers Stakes, the Metropolitan Handicap, and the Donn Handicap. But after his 3-year-old Rinaldi won the New York Stallion Stakes Spectacular Bid Division June 23 at Belmont Park, he declared, “This is the most…
It is the rare Thoroughbred that gets a formal retirement ceremony. Earlier this year, Justify, the 13th winner of the U.S. Triple Crown, paraded on the track before heading off to a stud career, but most horses move quietly on from the racetrack, their retirements noted only in their disappearance from the entries. As 2019 begins,…
New York-bred Kharafa won the Ashley T. Cole Stakes at Belmont Park for the first time in September, 2013. He was four years old, and the winner’s circle ceremony was especially poignant. The win was Kharafa’s first in a stakes race, and his owner and breeder, Lawrence Durocher, had died four months earlier, leaving daughter…
A decade ago, the New York breeding industry was in a steep downturn. The 2008 economic crisis had led to farms closing and mares being shipped to other states, and a program that had worked to establish itself with quality breeding seemed in danger of becoming almost irrelevant. Fast-forward to 2018, and the situation is…
On a cold March afternoon, Joan Taylor and Bill Wilmot stood in the paddock at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. They’d traveled nearly four hours from their farm in Saratoga Springs to watch Holiday Disguise, the 4-year-old filly they’d bred and sold as a weanling, run in the Heavenly Prize Stakes and try to…
The frozen paddocks of upstate New York are a long way from the sweltering devastation of Puerto Rico. At the ReRun adoption and retraining facility in East Greenbush, New York, about 40 miles south of Saratoga Springs — where the temperature was 2 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 degrees C) on a recent morning, a nine-year-old U.S.…
Racing traditionalists will remember that, not too long ago, the excitement of the Saratoga meet gave way to the excitement of what was known as the Belmont Fall Championship meet. Stakes races like the Woodward (now held at Saratoga) and the Jockey Club Gold Cup headlined a two-month meeting at Belmont Park that often decided…
Mike Repole seems to like pretty much everything about horse racing. Growing up in Queens, New York and hanging out at Aqueduct Racetrack, he absorbed the flavor of the track, reveling in its grittiness and its beauty, its excitement and its challenges. Now an owner and a breeder, his enthusiasm is undiminished, perhaps heightened by…
On the morning after a game runner-up finish in the TwinSpires Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint (gr. I) Oct. 31 at Keeneland, owner Sheila Rosenblum withdrew La Verdad from the Fasig-Tipton November sale to keep her as a broodmare. Purchased privately by Rosenblum in December 2013, La Verdad is a New York-bred by Yes It’s…
Brooklyn Backstretch 