On Belmont day 2006, the name of one New York Hall of Famer and racing legend was swapped out for another, when the Riva Ridge Stakes became the Woody Stephens. Stephens’ legacy is cemented in his long list of accomplishments, among them the 11 champions he trained, the Eclipse he won as the nation’s top…
Tomorrow at Belmont Park, graded stakes step aside to make way for a day of New York-bred racing. Seven stakes races offering combined purses of $850,000 will be headlined by the first running of the $150,000 Commentator, named in honor of the New York-bred who won the Whitney Handicap in 2005 and 2008. In 2003,…
“’We bid you welcome to our cabin by the sea.’” With these words, the Coney Island Jockey Club announced its existence in September, 1879. Headed by Leonard Jerome, the club was formed to build a new racetrack in Brooklyn; “the sea” was Sheepshead Bay, in the southwest corner of the borough, and the racetrack that…
It’s Saturday afternoon, and Shug McGaughey sits placidly in a chair in the shedrow of barn 20. Intent on his Blackberry, he seems pleasantly oblivious: to approaching visitors; to an impending storm making itself known in stirring winds and scudding clouds; to a tempest of another kind, one created by the media as he gets…
Brooklyn Backstretch 