Earlier this year, on a cold January morning on the backstretch at Laurel, exercise rider Chelsey Keiser asked agent Kevin Witte the best time to try to start a career as a jockey. She’d been told, she said, to start in January, to leave herself as much time as possible to get wins, in the…
Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens is the last racetrack in New York City. Across the Belt Parkway from Kennedy Airport, it has its own stop on the subway, and virtually from the day of its opening 1894, it has been disparaged, the down-market cousin of the upscale tracks that used to populate New…
On a November afternoon in 2006, I sat at my desk at school, taking a little break from the work of an 11th and 12th grade dean to check the weekday entries at Aqueduct. Maybe I was looking for cat horses; maybe I was trying to figure out which horse to play in the SHOWdown…
At Pimlico last month, more than 600 people attended a two-day exhibition produced by the Retired Racehorse Training Project. Dozens of retired Thoroughbreds performed in a variety of disciplines, showing off newly learned skills in hunting, jumping, polo, and even police work. The weekend provided an opportunity for retired Thoroughbreds to demonstrate their adaptability and usefulness…
For Howard Nolan Jr., Thoroughbred racing has been a nearly 70-year love affair, one that began in Saratoga in 1946 and was a case of love at first sight. “I was a fan from day one,” he said in June, not long after a horse that he bred, Readtheprospectus, had won his first stakes race,…
On Saturday afternoon at Santa Anita Park, Jim Rome did something few horse owners have accomplished: he won a Breeders’ Cup race for the second consecutive year. Two days later and 2,000 miles away, he sold the horse that did it for him, Mizdirection, for $2.7 million. Rome runs his horses in the name of…
Day two of the Breeders’ Cup kicks off at 3:05 ET with the $2 million Juvenile Fillies and will end Saturday night with the $5 million Classic, with a post time of 8:35 ET. TV coverage begins at 3:30 pm ET on NBC Sports Network and switches at 8 pm ET to NBC for the…
For a woman who doesn’t like the city, Maryland’s Annie Finney has made quite a name for herself on the New York circuit. A native of the greater Baltimore area, Finney has worked since 2011 as an exercise rider for Todd Pletcher; based at first in Saratoga and now at his Belmont barn, she works…
We’re less than 24 hours away from one of the most anticipated racing events of the year, the Breeders’ Cup, taking place on Friday and Saturday at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California. Two days of racing offer 14 Breeders’ Cup races with purses of $25 million, highlighted Friday by the $2 million Distaff and Saturday by…
On the last weekend of October a year ago, Thoroughbred trainer Mark Hennig and his wife Rosemary were on their way home from Florida. They’d heard about the impending storm heading towards their New York home, but they weren’t particularly concerned. “We were just due to come back that day,” Hennig said this week at…
Brooklyn Backstretch 