If this were an ordinary year, Saturday would not be Travers Day. If this were an ordinary year, hundreds of people would line up outside the gates of Saratoga Race Course in the wee hours of the morning, waiting for the gates to open so that they could charge inside to snag their preferred location,…
Saratoga: The GI, $1 million Travers at 1 ¼ miles (Kentucky Derby qualifying points: 100-40-20-10) by Brian Nadeau Brian handicaps at Capital OTB and Horseplayer Now, and he’ll offer analysis and selections of Derby points races, hoping to make us all a little money as we head to the Belmont Stakes. Follow him on Twitter here. #1 First Line…
In 2011, Joe Dietrick made his annual trip to Saratoga Race Course from his home in northeast Pennsylvania. He’s come here for decades, and when he was younger, he’d park his mobile home in Saratoga for the whole meet. On that day in 2011, Dietrick was with his son Jon and two grandsons. John Velazquez…
Saratogians are proud of the Travers Stakes. Most of the thousands of fans who show up every year probably don’t know that the race was first run in 1864, or that it was named for one of the men who established Saratoga Race Course; they do know that the day of the Travers is something…
When racing fans think of Travers-winning jockeys, they might think of Chris McCarron or Jerry Bailey, who each won Saratoga’s flagship race three times. They might think of Javier Castellano, Braulio Baeza, Eddie Arcaro, or Pat Day, who won it four times. They probably wouldn’t think of Shelby Barnes. Shelby “Pike” Barnes won the Travers…
The last time a horse won the Triple Crown, cable television didn’t exist, much less social media like Twitter and Facebook. When Affirmed won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakesin 1978, he was the third horse to do so in six years. Secretariat had broken the 25-year drought in 1973, and Seattle…
Last year at Royal Ascot, Estimate, a horse owned by Queen Elizabeth II, won the Gold Cup in its 207th running. As the Queen traditionally presents the trophy to the winning owner, her victory presented something of a problem, solved when her son Prince Andrew stepped in to do the honors. In August of 1864,…
The Travers was shaping up to be the race of the summer when the winners of the three Triple Crown Races—Orb, Oxbow , and Palace Malice—all pointed to it. Without a clear divisional leader, one of those three might have sealed up the three-year-old championship with a win. Oxbow didn’t make it to the race; sidelined by…
I want to like Palace Malice. I really do. I’ve wanted to for a while, going back to before the Belmont. He’s owned by likeable connections. He’s got a good racing story, that whole blinkers-in-the-Derby debacle and all, then coming back to win the Belmont. He won the Jim Dandy. But I have a hard…
In this historic summer at Saratoga Race Course, as the town of Saratoga Springs celebrates the sesquicentennial of Thoroughbred racing, the Travers Stakes—run for the 144th time this year—is living up to its billing as the Mid-Summer Derby. Though tomorrow’s $1 million race will not, as anticipated earlier this summer, feature a match-up of the…
Brooklyn Backstretch 