Every Travers day, the most valued piece of real estate at Saratoga Race Course is a picnic table in the backyard. About 8 feet long, all 850 of them are snatched up within minutes of the gates opening at 7 a.m., by people who have been waiting in line since the wee hours of the…
There’s a week left in the Saratoga 2016 season, but with no Pink Sheet next Tuesday, today’s the day to look back at the meet and offer some wishes for Saratoga 2017. This may be an unpopular opinion, but the new copper roofs on the Carousel and the escalator are a welcome change from the…
Before August 18, trainer Ray Handal was putting together an impressive string of accomplishments from the claim box…impressive, unfortunately, in all the wrong ways. “I’ve lost 13 shakes in a row,” he said, standing outside his barn on the grounds of Saratoga Raceway, the harness track across Nelson Avenue from Saratoga Race Course. “I haven’t…
The Jimmy Toner barn on the Saratoga backstretch was a busy one on Monday, and not only because Toner had horses to train, turf slips to fill out, condition books to check. The routine was the same, but it might have been taking a little longer than usual, because of the number of people who…
In terms of odd combinations, trainer Jimmy Toner and Facebook might rank right up there with mustard and pizza, Felix and Oscar, and A-Rod and the Yankees. But throw in a 14-year-old with a serious racing pedigree, and you might just have the perfect blend. Last fall, eighth-grader Elsa Lorieul brought the Toner barn into…
When Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas agreed to train horses for the recently established Churchill Downs Racing Club, he figured that he and the club members would be in it mostly for the fun. He didn’t quite envision that that fun would involve a Grade II stakes race at Saratoga, but Friday afternoon,…
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…
It is an easy thing to have an affair with Saratoga. One knows at the onset that it will last only a week, the month of August at the most, before return to the cares and responsibilities of everydayness. But for a fleeting time, problems of a troubled world seemingly are arrested while the racing…
When Jay Hanley met Sol Kumin at a cocktail party on Nantucket several years ago, the talk quickly turned to horse racing, the former having grown up going to the track, the latter knowing nothing about it. Intrigued, Kumin proposed creating a partnership to buy some horses, an idea about which Hanley was enthusiastic, with…
A few hours after the third race on Sunday, Aug. 7, Lacey Gaudet stood on the second floor of the clubhouse at Saratoga Race Course. It’s a place she’s been many times before, but despite her familiarity with it, on that afternoon, she viewed the place with a new perspective, that of a trainer with…
Brooklyn Backstretch 