On this fine, blustery, snowy, gusty Saturday morning, when I should be at Belmont but I am instead at home, I was engaging in a leisurely breakfast coupled with some serious procrastinating when I noticed that Twitter suggested that I follow @espnhorseracing. @espnhorseracing? Who knew? Cool! Except…@espnhorseracing last tweeted on August 20, 2010. That tweet…
John Gaver doesn’t look quite bulky enough to carry the weight of three generations of racing history. Tall, lean, and lanky, Gaver seems pretty unburdened in general, walking his shedrow at the Thoroughbred Center in Lexington, welcoming a guest, elaborating at length on the horses in his care. Utterly unassuming as he discusses his horses’…
New York’s stars were on display at Belmont on Saturday. The weather was beautiful, the atmosphere festive, the backyard crowded. And the horses didn’t disappoint. Early in the card, Flying Zee Stable took two races. The racing operation of the late Carl Lizza, Flying Zee’s dispersal begins this week at the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky yearling sale,…
It rained on Belmont Day. It was cloudy on Travers Day. It rained on Jockey Club Gold Cup day. But this Saturday is New York Showcase day, and it looks like we’re going to get perfect autumn weather on the day that to me embodies fall racing in New York. If we’re lucky, the trees…
We poor starved racing fans are so eager for mainstream coverage of our sport that we grasp eagerly at whatever crumbs the media want to throw us. Occasional coverage on live TV? Thank you! An HBO series on life at the racetrack? Oh, you are too kind. A documentary by the Worldwide Leader in Sports?…
“Fleet Valid also jumped his first crossrails in the lesson! Go Fleet!” Scrolling through my timeline last month, I came across this tweet. Fleet Valid? Hm. Sounded familiar. And yes, a look at his past performances revealed that from November of 2007 to April of 2009, Fleet Valid made 12 appearances on the New York…
The Friday feature at Brooklyn Backstretch is generally devoted to New York racing’s past, but today we’re looking south, to the great racing state of Maryland as Laurel Park celebrates 100 years of racing. For five years in the early 90’s, I lived in Maryland, just north of Baltimore, smack dab in the middle of…
Rules of the race, 4035.2: Foul riding penalized. (b) A horse crossing another may be disqualified, if in the judgment of the stewards, it interferes with, impedes or intimidates another horse, or the foul altered the finish of the race, regardless of whether the foul was accidental, willful, or the result of careless riding. The…
It is, they say, better to be lucky than good. My Miss Aurelia is both. She won her first start, at Saratoga on opening day. And when her connections went back to the barn that afternoon, waiting for them was the tiniest of little black kittens, curled up in the shedrow, not more than a…
Among the trio of Grade 1 races on Saturday at Belmont is the Jamaica, named for Jamaica, Queens, for 56 years the home of Jamaica Racetrack. Opened in 1903, Jamaica was the odd track out in 1959, when management of racing here consolidated under the New York Racing Association, first known as the Greater New…
Brooklyn Backstretch 