On the day that last week’s column was published, the column in which I raised questions about the accuracy, timeliness, and consistency of the information in the New York State Gaming Commission’s database of equine injuries, I received an e-mail from the Commission, correcting my assertion that thefatality report from the Saratoga 2014 meeting had…
It is an easy thing to have an affair with Saratoga. One knows at the onset that it will last only a week, the month of August at the most, before return to the cares and responsibilities of everydayness. But for a fleeting time, problems of a troubled world seemingly are arrested while the racing…
When Jay Hanley met Sol Kumin at a cocktail party on Nantucket several years ago, the talk quickly turned to horse racing, the former having grown up going to the track, the latter knowing nothing about it. Intrigued, Kumin proposed creating a partnership to buy some horses, an idea about which Hanley was enthusiastic, with…
A few hours after the third race on Sunday, Aug. 7, Lacey Gaudet stood on the second floor of the clubhouse at Saratoga Race Course. It’s a place she’s been many times before, but despite her familiarity with it, on that afternoon, she viewed the place with a new perspective, that of a trainer with…
Trainer Rick Schosberg shipped from his Belmont Park base to Saratoga this year on the Tuesday before the meet started. The routine has been the same for decades: the stable staff heads up to get the barn ready, and then the horses arrive, with Schosberg, his wife Dawn, his dogs following behind. The same process,…
Though several indicators were down from last year in Monday night’s first session of the annual Fasig-Tipton yearling sale, the evening did provide some fireworks, most notably when a half-sister to undefeated champion Songbird by 2004 Horse of the Year Ghostzapper brought $800,000, and again towards the end of the night, when a colt sired…
On Sunday morning not long before post time, several dozen protestors gathered on the corner of East and Union Avenues. They held signs decrying the deaths of nine Thoroughbreds here since the meet began on July 22, one reading “Stop Racing Horses to the Grave.” Though the views of most people attending the track are…
Monday, August 8 At the races Stakes races: $100,000 New York Stallion Series Cab Calloway Division for three-year-olds, 1 mile on the turf Low Roller Handicapping Challenge. Take your shot with a $40 buy-in ($30 goes to your own live bankroll, $10 to the prize pool). Registration begins at 11 am near the Fourstardave Sports Bar…
On Saturday morning, Andrew Motion didn’t look like a man who hadn’t had much sleep over the last couple days. Two days earlier, he’d loaded a yearling filly onto a van and driven overnight to Saratoga from his Upperville, VA farm; three days before he’ll send his first horse through the auction ring here, he…
More than 15 years ago, folklorist Ellen McHale was asked by the National Museum of Racing to do a short-term consulting project on the life of backstretch workers at Saratoga Race Course. “The education department wanted more information about the people who worked on the backstretch,” said McHale recently from her office at the New…
Brooklyn Backstretch 