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…
Following the monumental success of the Fasig-Tipton select yearling sale earlier this week, a sale that saw gains in gross sales and in average and median sales price, and at which 14 horses sold for more than $1 million, a record for this sale, attention will now turn to the company’s sale of preferred New…
“Improbable” would be a generous way to describe Robin Sparkles’ route to the winner’s circle for a graded stakes race at Saratoga Race Course. Her dam, My Sparky, was modestly successful, winning five races from 17 starts and earning $147,000. In 2014, My Sparky was sold at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga fall mixed sale, a sale…
Family connections and the power of pedigree fueled particularly sweet victories for the connections of City Man and Giacosa, winners of the turf events for older horses on New York-bred Showcase Day at Saratoga Race Course on Aug. 27. The owners of both winners also raced their sires, millionaires whose bloodlines are infusing the New…
The winners of the Fleet Indian Stakes and the Albany Stakes at Saratoga Race Course are both lightly raced three-year-olds, but beyond that and their stakes wins on Aug. 27, the horses represent very different paths to New York-bred stakes success. Albany winner Americanrevolution boasts elite connections: bred by notable New York breeders Fred W.…
With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, this year’s Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale of New York-bred yearlings proved that you can, indeed, go home again. Absent from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 2020 because of the coronavirus, the sale returned this year, recording gains in all metrics. Sellers of New York-bred horses last year were forced to set up…
There’s never a good time for a crisis, but it’s hard to imagine a less convenient time for Covid-19 to have hit the New York racing and breeding industries than mid-March. Mares were foaling and being bred; high-stakes races were on the calendar at Aqueduct; and the popular sales for two-year-olds in training were hitting…
JIM BOND HAS BEEN TRAINING horses for 40 years. He’s won dozens of graded stakes races, including the Whitney Handicap, the Travers Stakes, the Metropolitan Handicap, and the Donn Handicap. But after his 3-year-old Rinaldi won the New York Stallion Stakes Spectacular Bid Division June 23 at Belmont Park, he declared, “This is the most…
It is the rare Thoroughbred that gets a formal retirement ceremony. Earlier this year, Justify, the 13th winner of the U.S. Triple Crown, paraded on the track before heading off to a stud career, but most horses move quietly on from the racetrack, their retirements noted only in their disappearance from the entries. As 2019 begins,…
Brooklyn Backstretch 