On July 19, 2019, the venerable Thoroughbred Quick Call breathed his last. Humanely euthanized at age 35, he had lived for 18 years at the Wallkill Correctional Facility as part of Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation’s Second Chances program. Quick Call earned $807,000 in a seven-year career, counting among his victories the 1988 and 1989 Forego Handicaps…
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.…
At 9 A.M. on a chilly Saturday morning, the farm at first seems quiet. The parking lot is largely empty, devoid of visitors who will begin to arrive soon after the noon opening, and on first glance, it might seem impossible that the 15-acre facility a short drive from Saratoga Springs houses 17 retired Thoroughbreds.…
On July 31, 2006, a 3-year-old black horse named Songster made his Saratoga debut in the Grade 2 Amsterdam Stakes. The Darley-owned colt was already a graded stakes winner: he achieved that when he won the Grade 3 Hirsch Jacobs Stakes on the Preakness undercard, crushing the field by 10 lengths. Three weeks later, he took the Grade 2…
There is a Genaro family tradition of heading to the harness track in Saratoga on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for an afternoon of simulcasting, and in 2007, I joined my father and brother for the first time, setting up shop on the second floor and settling in for a day of wagering on Aqueduct, Laurel,…
The Olympics are as much about stories as they are about competition. The athlete who overcame adversity. The rags-to-riches story. The “discovery” of a diamond in the rough. A bit of heartbreak, a lot of sacrifice. As they say in the world of Thoroughbred auctions, Blackfoot Mystery ticks all those boxes. And like the world…
In early March, Emily Daignault-Salvaggio logged onto Facebook and saw that her friend Bev Strauss, the co-founder and president of Mid-Atlantic Horse Rescue, had tagged her in a post. When she clicked on it, her heart sank. Staring at her from the screen was a familiar face, a chestnut horse that she had, months earlier,…
At a Sept. 1 summit presented by the New York State Gaming Commission on racehorse aftercare, the New York Racing Association pledged that it would donate $5 per start at its tracks to the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance. NYRA follows in the footsteps of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, which in 2014 began contributing $5…
Four years ago August 4, David Jacobson claimed a horse at Saratoga. Nothing terribly unusual about that, nor about the fact that Jacobson ran the horse, who had finished fifth, back 21 days later, nor that the trainer bumped the bay gelding way up in class for that next start, nor that Jacobson won with…
At the close of the second Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit in March 2008, the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation and The Jockey Club, underwriters and hosts for the event, released eight recommendations, developed by the working groups that participated in that summit held in Lexington, Kentucky. Recommendation #7 reads: “Find solutions for unwanted…
Brooklyn Backstretch 