Trainer Jeremiah Englehart started this summer’s Saratoga meet about as well as one could expect: he won with a two-year-old, with his first starter of the meet, in a graded stakes, and in one of Saratoga’s most historic races, the Sanford Stakes, which has been won by horses like More Than Ready, City Zip, Afleet…
Breeding Thoroughbreds might be the ultimate reality show, and Michael Slezak would know. Slezak made his name writing about American Idol, amassing more than 30,000 followers on X while writing for Entertainment Weekly and TVLine. He’s appeared on National Public Radio and various network morning shows, and in 2010, he wrote a guest essay for…
Always a celebratory event, this year’s New York Thoroughbred Breeders awards ceremony was bittersweet, as the evening’s big winner was Maple Leaf Mel. Steps from winning the Grade 1 Test Stakes at Saratoga Race Course last August, the daughter of Cross Traffic suffered a catastrophic broken leg and was euthanized on the track. Despite her…
When Robert Evans purchased Raucous for $300,000 at the 2016 Keeneland September yearling sale, he had his eye on the future. Though he intended to race her, he also knew that upon retirement, she’d join his broodmare band, and she had what he was looking for. “She’s by Speightstown,” he said. “I wanted to get…
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…
Growing up on Long Island, Albert Fried Jr. started riding horses, he says, when he was about 10 years old, in the early 1940s. A talented horseman even at that young age, within a few years he was given an assignment that, if a little hyperbole can be forgiven, may well have changed the course…
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,…
Brooklyn Backstretch 