The gates were open, offering a clear and tempting view inside… For some reason, I love the sight of these picnic tables stacked, waiting patiently to be distributed around the yard. Anonymous, lowly wooden tables for ten and a half months of the year, come July 23rd, they are among the most prized real estate…
Shug, Phipps, and fillies: a racing combination that we ignore at our peril. An incomplete list of Phipps racing females trained by Shug McGaughey: Personal Ensign. Pine Island. Inside Information. My Flag. Storm Flag Flying. Smuggler. Need I go on? I can… (and I should have–thanks, LJK, and sorry, Heavenly Prize!) Small wonder, then, that…
I don’t have HBO, so I didn’t see the episode of Costas Now in which noted sportswriter Buzz Bissinger went off on Deadspin’s Will Leitch on the subject of blogging vs. journalism. I did (as who did not?) read/hear about Bissinger’s bizarrely agitated and profane rant, and thus when I was recently catching up on…
The Blood-Horse reports that a date has been set for members of the racing industry to appear before members of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The hearing, entitled “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse,” will take place on June 19th. Nice…
At the end of May, I wrote about the Metropolitan Handicap, noting that the last winner of the Handicap Triple Crown was Fit to Fight; four days after the Met Mile was run, Fit to Fight was euthanized due to, in that classic phrase, “the infirmities of old age.” He stood at Lane’s End and…
I don’t really care about the Triple Crown. Except for every once in a while, when some horse I really like makes it through his two-year-old season and manages to stay sound and competitive until early May, I don’t really care who wins the Kentucky Derby. I care less about who wins the Preakness, though…
Late last week, Patrick, writer of Handride and leader of the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance, invited the TBA bloggers to post our picks for Saturday’s stakes races. I am always reluctant to do such things; many of my days at the races result in my cashing not a single ticket, and my father calls me the…
As soon as Big Brown won the Kentucky Derby, I started to worry. He was so dominant, and the rest of the three-year-olds didn’t seem quite so sharp, and there seemed to be a pretty good chance that he’d win the Preakness, and that I’d head to this year’s Belmont, for the second time in…
Photo credit to ESPN So much to say about today at Belmont: the heat, the crowd, the winners, the losers, the plumbing. It’s a day of stories. But tonight, congratulations to Da’ Tara, the colt called a rank outsider, the longest shot on the board; and to Nick Zito, called a fool for entering not…
I am shortly heading out to beautiful Belmont Park to spend a day that may well rival last summer’s Travers on the unpleasant scale. I’m not a big fan of crowds or excessive heat, and both will be in abundance in a few short hours. So as I get myself into the spirit of this…
Brooklyn Backstretch 