Day 6 at the Spa dawned cool, dry, sunny, and beautiful; running past the Oklahoma this morning, I watched horses working out in the kind of light foggy sunlight that so many people have captured in photographs of Saratoga. It was sublime. And in my second breeze for the Fasig-Tipton 5K run on August 15th,…
“There’s nothing quite like watching a true champion win a grand old race at Saratoga,” wrote Steve Crist on Saturday afternoon, perfectly and simply summing up the experience of watching Forever Together in the 71st running of the Diana. A year ago on the first Saturday of the meet, Spa visitors were treated to one…
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…
A day at the races offers any number of interesting storylines, opening day at Saratoga more than usual. We could talk about the weather (yes, of course, it rained, but as one NYRA employee said to me after the first race, “Hey, it’s already better than last year—we got a turf race in!”); we could…
“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…
It was standing room only in the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Racing last night; I arrived about ten minutes before the 7:00 start time, and Museum staff were scurrying to find extra chairs to bring in. Last evening’s guests at the annual Saratoga meeting preview were NYRA president Charlie Hayward; racing…
Brooklyn Backstretch 