A little after 5pm ET on Friday afternoon, R. Larry Johnson answered the phone at his Virginia home, a bit surprised to hear from a reporter from Saratoga Springs. Alone in his family room, he’d just watched his four-year-old Maryland homebred Future Is Now win a tight photo finish in the Intercontinental Stakes (G2) at…
Under an unsettled Saratoga sky, R. Larry Johnson’s homebred Future Is Now earned her first graded stakes win in the $200,000 Intercontinental Stakes (G2T), edging favored Roses for Debra in a photo finish. Minutes after a downpour and high winds passed through Saratoga Race Course on June 7, nine fillies and mares lined up for the 5 1/2-furlong race run over a…
At no point during the running of the $150,000 Tremont Stakes did Studlydoright look like a winner, except for when it really counted. In the first stakes race of the four-day Belmont Stakes Racing Festival at Saratoga Race Course, the two-year-old colt broke with alacrity from post 1 under jockey Xavier Perez, putting a head…
On Wednesday afternoon, I saw a video on Twitter that spanned the newly renovated ground floor of the clubhouse at Saratoga Race Course, and my jaw dropped. I may have actually winced. I felt a little sick. I had seen photos of the new Jim Dandy Bar, relocated and expanded, and they didn’t elicit much…
If you’re above a certain age, you’ll remember that phrase as the iconic tagline in advertisements for Blackglama furs, a campaign that began in the late 1960s and ran for nearly 50 years, associating the fur company’s products with glamorous stars like Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Gisele Bundchen, and Janet Jackson. The idea was that…
“Bustin Stones in my opinion is the most underrated stallion in the country hands-down.” That was Jon Taisey’s response when asked to comment on the horses that Hibiscus Stables had bred by the stallion standing at Waldorf Farm. The executive vice president of sales and client relations for Hibiscus, Taisey and his partners Mike Oliveto…
Well, it’s been quite a few years since we’ve done one of these! And we’re late out of the gate, and a bit abbreviated for now, but I hope to get the full summer list posted sooner rather than later, and within the next day or two I’ll add upcoming dark day activities to this…
In 1867, the six-day summer meeting at Saratoga Race Course began on Aug. 7. The New York Times offered a glowing preview, praising the beauty of the women in attendance, the “unclouded brilliancy” of the sun, and the condition of the racing surface. That fourth season of racing in Saratoga, The Times claimed, “promises to…
This Friday at Saratoga Race Course will see the last of the 13 stakes races carded this summer for horses bred or sired in New York. Saratoga Showcase Day was added to the racing calendar in 2014 and scheduled for Travers weekend, increasing the visibility of the state’s breeding program on the biggest racing weekend…
Seven years ago, the New York State Gaming Commission undertook a daunting mission: to locate every New York-bred Thoroughbred that raced between 2010 and 2012 and didn’t race after 2012. A year later, in 2016, the Commission released its findings. The number of horses that fit the criteria was 3,894. The Commission was able to…
Brooklyn Backstretch 