Oscar Pistorius, the “Blade Runner” sprinter who became a media darling at the London Olympics for competing without legs, ran a race last December against an Arabian horse in Qatar, ostensibly to raise disabilities awareness. A sorry spectacle, sure, but…
Lavalette Gold imploded after crossing the finish line in Thursday’s 4th race at Belmont, and this time the NYRA cameras couldn’t help but capture the ugliness…around the 1:40 mark (Race Replays, Thursday, Race 4). Dead at three. The video, of…
Tradition. Beauty. Elegance. Billing itself “The Sport of Kings,” racing presents its horses, especially the regal Thoroughbreds, as resplendent, pampered athletes proudly displaying their prowess to admiring fans. The horse, they tell us, is born to run, loves to run,…
Most reasonable racing insiders will concede that less-than-brisk business at the more pedestrian tracks is the result of a flawed product. But when an upper crust venue like Saratoga dips, the search for scapegoats begins. While most blamed the economy…
If ever there were a reason for racing patrons to come, the summer-long 150th anniversary celebration of “America’s Oldest Sports Arena” should have been it. But it wasn’t. Not only did attendance decline almost 4% from last year, but the…
When six-year-old Irish Thoroughbred St Nicholas Abbey, one of the most celebrated racehorses on the planet, broke his pastern while training in July, the prognosis was bleak. But not to fear, if a horse is valuable enough – and with…
When a racehorse breaks down, especially one as popular as former-claimer-turned-stakes-winner Saginaw, the garbage starts to flow. In the Times Union account of Friday’s death in the 3rd race at Saratoga, jockey Junior Alvarado said, with “tears in his eyes,”…
Tim Wilkin is a fine sportswriter, even if one of his duties is to cover horseracing for the Albany Times Union. (Of course, horseracing is as out of place on the Sports pages as blowing away Whitetails in autumn.) But…
Earlier this week, the NYS Gaming Commission and the NY Racing Association announced some “enhanced security measures” for Saturday’s $1 million Travers in Saratoga. Besides the out-of-competition drug testing done on Wednesday, the horses – and their vet treatments –…
$1,225,000. That’s what a filly relative of Barbaro and AP Indy fetched at the Saratoga Sale of Selected Yearlings this past Monday and Tuesday. All seemed happy with the final numbers: 108 horses sold for a cumulative total of $31.87 million.…
Imagine a world without horseracing. Imagine the racehorse as extinct. No whips, no dope, no snapped sesamoids, no slashed carotids, and…no stables (where, as an aside, horses are kept penned and isolated for the vast majority of their day). If,…
This summer, Saratoga Race Course marks its 150th anniversary. Proudly billing itself the oldest sporting venue in the country, the august track, and indeed the entire region, is waxing nostalgic and celebrating the racing elite who trod (trotted) over those…
