“COASTAL MOON tracked the pace setters most of the way, asked for run turning for home but was overwhelmed by outside runner, lost ground but fought back with a game performance… REBEL SPY trailed well off the rest of the field and hit his best stride late… RED POND was through after half a mile.”…
When Robert Barbara was a 10-year-old growing up in Canarsie, N.Y., a Brooklyn neighborhood that borders Jamaica Bay, his teenaged brother bought a horse to ride at a nearby stable in Mill Basin. Before long, it was the younger brother who had taken his place in the saddle. His talent evident, Barbara was soon competing…
Neither a champion nor a Hall of Fame inductee, Busanda nonetheless lives on in two ways: through her bloodlines and one of those Aqueduct winter races that, when I first started following races, sent me to the archives to figure out who those eponymous horses were. I don’t know whose idea it was to name a…
On the day that the Holy Bull Stakes was run at Gulfstream Park, a son of that 1994 Horse of the Year added to his Kentucky Derby points total with a win in the Grade III Withers at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York. Sunny Ridge earned 10 Derby points with his Withers win, adding…
“Originally this race was run over the memorable six-furlong straight course at Morris Park, then the newest and most elaborate of Metropolitan racing plants—which was a bit down grade and for that reason nicknamed the “toboggan slide”. (sic) (Hervey) As racing historian John Hervey notes above, the name of the Toboggan has nothing to do…
“No man in the country was more widely esteemed by racing men.” David Dunham Withers was born in 1822 in New York City; he and his family lived downtown on Greene Street, now in fashionable Soho. When his parents married, the couple was given a cottage by the bride’s father as a wedding present. According…
Gulfstream Park: The GII, $350,000 Holy Bull at 1 1/16 miles (Kentucky Derby qualifying points: 10-4-2-1) #1 Perfect Saint (20-1): Romans charge was 5-1 in a local optional claimer 21 days ago but didn’t run an inch behind his impressive stablemate Cherry Wine, who passed on this to await the GII Fountain of Youth here…
Aqueduct: The GIII, $250,000 Withers at 1 1/16 miles (Kentucky Derby qualifying points: 10-4-2-1) #1 Donegal Moon (15-1): It’s rare you get a longshot from Pletcher in a 3yo graded stakes, but this son of Malibu Moon certainly fits the bill, as he was well-beaten by today’s favorite Flexibility in the GII Remsen to end…
When the National Handicapping Championship kicks off later today at Treasure Island in Las Vegas, more than 500 players will take a shot at the $800,000 prize. One of them, Jonathon Kinchen, will be playing for considerably more than that–$2 million more to be exact. The winner of the 2015 National Handicapping Championship tour, Kinchen…
Last November, Ross Peddicord came to New York’s Equus Film Festival as an ambassador for Maryland horse racing. He expected the festival, which was being held for the second consecutive year in Manhattan, to serve as a platform for showcasing Maryland’s myriad equine activities. He didn’t expect to leave the festival wanting to bring a…
Brooklyn Backstretch 