According to the Maryland Jockey Club’s logo for the feature race at Pimlico this Saturday, this year is Preakness 143. That would mean that the first edition of the race was run in 1873, when Survivor won it. (1918 counts twice, because there were two divisions that year.) If you go by the June 3,…
“My lady prioress, and by your leave, So that I knew I should in no way grieve, I would opine that tell a tale you should, The one that follows next if you but would. Now will you please vouchsafe it, lady dear?” “Gladly,” said she, and spoke as you shall hear. (Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale)…
The stakes schedule at Saratoga at the turn of the last century was already robust. Announced in February in the New York Times for the 1901 season, it featured 25 races worth a total of $85,000. Among those to be run were the Adirondack, Spinaway, Travers, Alabama and Saratoga Cup. The racing meet that year was 22…
“One of the chief subjects of discussion in the paddock was the sale of yearlings at the Fasig-Tipton company mart last night…” The Daily Saratogian, Aug. 11, 1917 That time-honored Saratoga tradition began 100 years ago this month, when Fasig-Tipton held its first Thoroughbred sale in Saratoga. Established in 1898 to sell riding and driving…
For thirty years and more there was hardly a great race run in which one of their horses did not figure conspicuously. They were a city-bred pair, but they possessed an instinctive knowledge of horses and a talent for management that made them formidable from the beginning of their career. William H.P. Robertson, The History of…
By the eve of the last century, the Suburban Handicap had already been run 15 times, a fixture at the old Sheepshead Bay track in Brooklyn, already established, according to The New York Times, as “one of the great Spring handicaps.” That last 19th century renewal of the race was held on June 17, the cusp…
Though the first Belmont Stakes was run in 1867, it wasn’t run at Belmont Park until 1905. The race was inaugurated at Jerome Park in what is now the Bronx, where it stayed until 1889, when it moved to Morris Park, also in the Bronx. Run there until Morris Park closed in 1904, the Belmont…
Before Secretariat, there was Cicada. A decade before Secretariat became the first colt in 25 years to win the Triple Crown, Christopher Chenery, father of Helen, campaigned a filly who was setting her own records. At two, Cicada started 16 times, winning 11 races and never finishing worse than third; among her victories that year…
The child, sitting down with the old man close behind…had been thinking how strange it was that horses who were such fine honest creatures should seem to make vagabonds of all the men they drew about them… Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens couldn’t possibly have been thinking of Correction when he wrote those…
It should be clear by this time … that Busher has as good a chance to take the best three-year-old colts as Gallorette. “The Deadly Demoiselles” by Tasker Ogle, Turf and Sport Digest, September 1945 Before those words were written, the three-year-old Busher, bred by E.R. Bradley’s Idle Hour Farm, had already beaten not only…
Brooklyn Backstretch 