Earlier this week I wrote in the Saratogian about the rewards and difficulties of researching racing history; Superfecta took an excellent look at the work of archivists following the disastrous flooding at Churchill Downs. Friday, I turned my attention to the first running of the Test, the 96th running of which takes places today at…
In Roman mythology, Diana is the goddess of the hunt; she is swift, she is chaste, and she is deadly. When the youth Actaeon saw her bathing naked, she transformed him into a stag and turned loose his own hunting dogs to kill him. Since 1939, fillies and mares have contested the Diana, often at…
“Saratoga to-day is as full of transient visitors as a hive is of bees just before swarming time.” (New York Times, August 8, 1865) To get to Saratoga, Red Smith famously said, go to exit 14 of the Northway, turn left on Union Avenue, and go back 100 years. Though speaking of the racetrack, the…
Today’s Belmont feature is the 93rd running of the venerable Coaching Club American Oaks. Though this Grade I race has undoubtedly lost some of its luster (true of so many of American’s great races), its history merits an acknowledgment of its notable runnings. It is the third leg of the Triple Tiara, won by such…
On Travers morning, the gates at Saratoga open at 7 am, several hours earlier than usual, in order to allow the expected crowd to jam in, secure picnic tables, and while away the time until first post. NYRA entertains us by showing, on the TV screens throughout the track, the runnings of the Travers that…
May your day be full of boules, good wine, French cuisine, and revolutionary spirit. The Francophile in me is honoring the holiday by doing a little historical digging on appropriately-named horses—at least before the Champagne and Provencal rosé are broken out. The chestnut colt Bastille was born in 1918 and, according to Pedigree Query, won…
Some oft-told stories bear repeating, and as we head to a stakes-laden Fourth of July card at Belmont, the 1920 Dwyer comes to mind as one of those races whose story deserves to be told, yet again. On July 10th, 1920, Samuel Riddle’s once-beaten Man o’ War faced off against the only colt said to…
Yes, that’s right, August Belmont and Edith Wharton. Belmont the Jewish immigrant financier arriviste, he who changed his name from the German Schonberg to the French/Italian-flavored Belmont, the parvenu who married into the establishment, taking as his wife Carolyn Slidell Perry, daughter of the Commodore. Wharton the descendant of the great old Dutch New York…
It’s difficult for contemporary racing fans to see August Belmont as anything other than the namesake of the stakes race first and then the racetrack, but when he died in 1890, his very long New York Times obituary doesn’t even mention racing until the thirtieth (!) paragraph. A native of Germany, Belmont was born August…
For many New York racing fans who came of age too late for Secretariat in 1973, Easy Goer’s victory in the 1989 Belmont Stakes was the sweetest moment ever spent at a racetrack. I came across these words a few weeks ago in Joe Drape’s To the Swift: Classic Triple Crown Horses and Their Race for Glory.…
Brooklyn Backstretch 