Talk to most of the jockeys around your local racetrack, and you’ll find that they’ve taken one of a few paths to get to where they are. They grew up around horses; they started riding at a young age; they attended a jockey academy. Talk to jockey Samantha Colvin, and you’ll get quite a different…
To America’s racing fans, Gary Stevens is a Hall of Fame jockey, the man who came within a tantalizing length of winning the Triple Crown in 1997 aboard Silver Charm, the man who rode the filly Winning Colors to Kentucky Derby victory in 1998, the man who ruined Real Quiet’s Triple Crown bid in 1988.…
If you all did on Sunday was box Cornelio Velasquez/Jose Lezcano in exactas and play them in daily doubles, you’d have cashed $514 worth of winning tickets, for an investment of under $50. These two jockeys combined for six wins and three seconds, and while I doubt that they figured significantly into anyone’s betting strategy,…
Photo credit to Jessica Chapel at Railbird A year later and a few inches taller, the 6th grade Texas Titans, an A.A.U. basketball team who brought a 75-5 record to Saratoga, made it 76 – 5, beating the jockeys 49 – 32 in a game that for three quarters was much closer than the score…
Another Grade I at Belmont, another win for the longest shot on the board. Didn’t have this one, unfortunately, though I’m a little mad that I didn’t, as my eyes kept going back to Frost Giant in the program, and I dismissed my interest. Woulda, coulda, shoulda…but not nearly as bad poor Patrick’s day. I…
At the end of May, I wrote about the Metropolitan Handicap, noting that the last winner of the Handicap Triple Crown was Fit to Fight; four days after the Met Mile was run, Fit to Fight was euthanized due to, in that classic phrase, “the infirmities of old age.” He stood at Lane’s End and…
Late last week, Patrick, writer of Handride and leader of the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance, invited the TBA bloggers to post our picks for Saturday’s stakes races. I am always reluctant to do such things; many of my days at the races result in my cashing not a single ticket, and my father calls me the…
I’m in the middle of reading T.D. Thornton’s Not By A Long Shot (better late than never), and shortly after reading last week’s report that the Jockeys’ Guild recommended a 50% cut in the fees that jockeys pay their valets, I came across this paragraph: Aside from laying out the equipment for three or four…
Brooklyn Backstretch 