As I wrote in my bio on the TBA homepage, my first memory of being at Saratoga Racecourse is of General Assembly’s Travers, in 1979. I was fourteen, and my family had moved to Saratoga the previous summer; my father owned a business near the racetracks, and having rented our house to “summer people,” we…
Barclay Tagg’s nicely-named Groomedforvictory (out of Minigroom by Victory Gallop) first came to my attention on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, at the annual family gathering at Saratoga Harness for simulcasting. He was entered in the second and finished a game but well-beaten second, racing from just behind the leaders until the final turn, when he…
In the absence of local racing news (and let’s hope that this is a temporary situation due to the holiday break, not a taste of what the NY racing world will feel like on January 1st), NYRA reports that an Albany consulting firm will be working with B.E.S.T. (Backstretch Employees Service Team) to underwrite a…
I had heard a lot about, and seen photos of, the Anna House holiday party at which the children of the backstretch workers get to pick out gifts for their families, but nothing prepared me for the sight that greeted me when I showed up at my appointed hour of 12:30 on December 8th. The…
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Tuffy Gold, owned and trained by the same connections as Evening Attire. Tuffy is a half to Evening Attire, and his grandsire, Black Tie Affair, is Evening Attire’s sire. And, alas, Tuffy shares with his half-brother some challenges at the gate. In Saturday’s first race, Tuffy got…
The Blood-Horse reports that Roy and Gretchen Jackson have made another major gift to the Belmont Child Care Association. Gretchen is on the board of the BCCA, and she and Roy were the honorees at this year’s benefit in Saratoga. The Jacksons are major supporters of Anna House; there’s a playroom named after Lael Stables…
Several members of the racing press have alluded this week to an interview of Charles Hayward that was broadcast over the NYRA cctv system at the track this week. As I tuned in to my TiVo’d Inside Racing tonight, expecting to watch Evening Attire’s win in the Queen’s County for the twelfth or thirteenth time,…
The Blood-Horse has put much of its synthetic surfaces edition online for free. I’d like to think that what I wrote at the end of this post had something to do with it (someone at The Blood-Horse did see the post, according to good old StatCounter), but I fear that I’d be gravely overestimating the…
One of the topics highlighted in the recent edition of The Blood-Horse is the lack of information about equine breakdowns during training hours. Tuesday’s Daily Racing Form noted three breakdowns during morning training that day on Hollywood Park’s Cushion track; the item was buried in a longer piece, headlined by a story on Nashoba’s Key.…
The combined forces of The Blood-Horse’s writers have done a terrific job of exploring the various issues associated with synthetic track surfaces. As with most issues that can be viewed from multiple perspectives, I suspect that readers will bring their biases (no pun intended) to this issue of the magazine, and that both detractors and…
Brooklyn Backstretch 