On July 31, 2006, a 3-year-old black horse named Songster made his Saratoga debut in the Grade 2 Amsterdam Stakes. The Darley-owned colt was already a graded stakes winner: he achieved that when he won the Grade 3 Hirsch Jacobs Stakes on the Preakness undercard, crushing the field by 10 lengths. Three weeks later, he took the Grade 2…
On a morning earlier this summer, Soledad O’Brien failed to pick up the phone for a scheduled interview, calling back a short time later with effusive apologies. “I got dumped by my horse,” she said. “He got spooked, took a side step, and I fell off.” She is matter-of-fact about the experience, the result of a lifetime around horses, which began, as…
There is a Genaro family tradition of heading to the harness track in Saratoga on the Saturday after Thanksgiving for an afternoon of simulcasting, and in 2007, I joined my father and brother for the first time, setting up shop on the second floor and settling in for a day of wagering on Aqueduct, Laurel,…
Two years ago, on the advice of bloodstock agent Tom McGreevy, Fox Hill Farm’s Rick Porter entered the bidding fray in the Humphrey S. Finney Pavilion at the Fasig-Tipton yearling sale in Saratoga, trying to add a dark bay Medaglia d’Oro filly to his already prodigious list of stakes-winning fillies and mares. Four-hundred thousand dollars…
In early March, Emily Daignault-Salvaggio logged onto Facebook and saw that her friend Bev Strauss, the co-founder and president of Mid-Atlantic Horse Rescue, had tagged her in a post. When she clicked on it, her heart sank. Staring at her from the screen was a familiar face, a chestnut horse that she had, months earlier,…
Candy Feat was able to cheat death once, but to the sorrow and heartbreak of his connections, he couldn’t do it twice. The Hard Spun gelding succumbed to an infection and laminitis on December 29. “Where do I even begin?” wrote trainer Priscilla Godsoe on Facebook and Instagram. “Today the Covert Farm and 90 North…
You don’t have to drive very far outside of the city of Baltimore to arrive in Maryland hunt country. Within 10 miles of the city proper, development gives way to farms; go a little further, and you’re in the heart of Maryland horse country, where races have been held for over a century. Thousands of…
This weekend’s Zoetis $1 Million Grand Prix equestrian event in Saugerties, New York is a long way from a trail ride in the Catskills, but for 26-year-old Agatha D’Ambra, the journey has been a relatively quick one. One of the competitors in this weekend’s event, D’Ambra grew up in Rexford, New York, just north of…
Brooklyn Backstretch 