In November 2011, Benjamín León went to Lexington, Kentucky to buy a racehorse. Not just any racehorse—he had his eye on one in particular, and he was, he said last weekend, determined to get her no matter what. He actually bought nine horses at the Keeneland November sale that year, spending $22.4 million on fillies…
The Travers was shaping up to be the race of the summer when the winners of the three Triple Crown Races—Orb, Oxbow , and Palace Malice—all pointed to it. Without a clear divisional leader, one of those three might have sealed up the three-year-old championship with a win. Oxbow didn’t make it to the race; sidelined by…
In this historic summer at Saratoga Race Course, as the town of Saratoga Springs celebrates the sesquicentennial of Thoroughbred racing, the Travers Stakes—run for the 144th time this year—is living up to its billing as the Mid-Summer Derby. Though tomorrow’s $1 million race will not, as anticipated earlier this summer, feature a match-up of the…
On Friday, June 7, the biggest news in the Belmont Park press box had nothing to do with the Belmont Stakes, taking place the next day. The buzz wasn’t about which horse might win, or what effect that day’s drenching rains might have on the track. The biggest news came when word spread that the…
The euphemism for a horse with both of his testicles is “intact.” The logical connotative sense, then, I guess, is that a horse that is gelded is “broken.” In reality, they are anything but; in fact, they are often the most beloved horses on the racetrack. Generally gelded when they’re young to address obstreperous behavior,…
“Skip the horse races in Saratoga Springs.” So advised New York Magazine in May, suggesting instead that visitors take advantage of the myriad other delights of the small city in upstate New York: the restaurants, the hotels, the parks. A former and erstwhile Saratoga resident, I heartily endorse all of those things, along with many…
More than 10 years ago, artist/writer/curator Rhonda Lieberman was at an art installation by James Turrell at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Queens. It was, said the East Village resident, all about light and emptiness, and about mediating environments. “It was an empty room, and the ceiling had been…
This month’s edition of sexism in sports is brought to you by Insider Louisville, the BBC, Hollywood Park, and the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club. Back in April, Insider Louisville published what was meant, according to the author, to be a paean to the female turf writer, an admiring salute to the women on the Churchill Downs backstretch…
Earlier this month, when horses gathered in the paddock at Belmont Park before heading to the track for the Belmont Stakes, they walked around an iconic white pine tree, thought to be a part of the estate on which the racetrack was constructed in 1905. Estimated to be nearly 200 years old, the tree was…
On Saturday, January 19, Ramon Dominguez won his third consecutive Outstanding Jockey Eclipse Award. He didn’t know it at the time, but the day before, he had ridden in his last race. While his friends and colleagues John Velazquez and Javier Castellano accepted the award on his behalf, Dominguez was in a New York hospital…
Brooklyn Backstretch 