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…
Only turf historians, or perhaps those who heard stories told by their grandfathers, would have recognized Winkfield’s name in the United States this decade. –Gerald Eskenazi in Winkfield’s 1974 New York Times obituary Three decades later, the New York Racing Association and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame decided to do something about…
“In 1903…a skinny, pleasant lad of 15 applied for a job at the Sanford Stud Farm in Amsterdam, N.Y. His name was Hollie Hughes and he was taken on as a night watchman.” — Red Smith, “Some Reflections on a Horseman” Hughes’ name is practically a byword for Sanford Stud Farm, the racing and breeding…
The winner of the feature race on Monday at Aqueduct, it was noted, ran gate-to-wire, starting in front and ending that way as the race’s second wagering choice. And yet, despite the bettors’ confidence, the outcome was extraordinarily unusual, and all but unnoticed. The winning owners are brothers who were born in Jamaica: Gaston and…
The mint juleps were flowing, and the music, supplied by a jazz trio tucked into the dining room, was southern and sweet. Women in elaborately designed hats and men in snappy fedoras selected from a menu in which bourbon played a featured role, their Derby-best attire not deterring them from digging into the ribs…
Neither a champion nor a Hall of Fame inductee, Busanda nonetheless lives on in two ways: through her bloodlines and one of those Aqueduct winter races that, when I first started following races, sent me to the archives to figure out who those eponymous horses were. I don’t know whose idea it was to name a…
“Originally this race was run over the memorable six-furlong straight course at Morris Park, then the newest and most elaborate of Metropolitan racing plants—which was a bit down grade and for that reason nicknamed the “toboggan slide”. (sic) (Hervey) As racing historian John Hervey notes above, the name of the Toboggan has nothing to do…
“No man in the country was more widely esteemed by racing men.” David Dunham Withers was born in 1822 in New York City; he and his family lived downtown on Greene Street, now in fashionable Soho. When his parents married, the couple was given a cottage by the bride’s father as a wedding present. According…
