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The evening of Sept. 27 was a memorable one in Central Kentucky. Over at Keeneland Race Course, Gov. Brereton C. Jones was regaled as the 88th Honor Guest at the Thoroughbred Club of America. On the other side of town, friends and family of Will Daugherty gathered to watch a horse he bred, with his father and business partner under the BlackRidge ...

It would be harsh and simplistic to say the Breeders’ Cup Classic is a mess, but that pretty much describes it. Case in point, there is a fairly good possibility that the winners of the Jockey Club Gold Cup, Awesome Again, Travers, Woodward, Dubai World Cup, and Suburban Handicap will not run. You had a 1-5 shot get beat by a 25-1 shot in the ...

Every good story in Thoroughbred racing leads to another. Case in point, the stakes results at Parx Racing and Belmont Park Sept. 21 drew a straight line to Central Kentucky, and specifically to the Keeneland sale grounds where the 13-session September yearling sale was nearing completion. At Parx, jockey Sophie Doyle earned her first grade 1 win ...

Racing used to be so cut and dry. It was easy to determine whether a race was good or bad just by handicapping it, watching it, and assessing whether it was a classy performance against classy competition and just how good the winner was. There usually weren’t any real human interest, Cinderella stories to cloud your vision. It was all about ...

One of the old adages of the Thoroughbred industry is “there are no secrets in racing.” Whispers burn up the backstretch, making it nearly impossible to hide a sharp 2-year-old working lights out toward its debut. Rumors swirl around stallions for weeks in advance of a press release noting they’ve been sold domestically or overseas. Well, ...

There are two elements that create interest in the Breeders’ Cup and help promote the event on a national scale. One is to have a superstar like American Pharoah or Goldikova or Enable to look forward to, preferably in the Classic as a rousing final act. The other is to have an epic showdown between two popular superstars, such as Easy Goer ...

The news cycle prior to the Keeneland September yearling sale was on full spin after Labor Day weekend. First up, following the disappointing news the weekend before that Churchill Downs Inc. was not interested in a casino license for Arlington International, it announced it was interested in building a new racetrack in northern Kentucky to ...

In a year like this you have to be prepared for quite a bit of juggling when assessing and ranking this year’s group of Breeders’ Cup Classic hopefuls. Every horse has positives and negatives and we will just have to see which one outweighs the other on all these horses come Breeders’ Cup week. To me, Preservationist is the old school (where ...

As the dark clouds moved in over Parx racetrack on Sept. 2 and with the predicted thunderstorms imminent, it threatened to disrupt the scheduled festivities to pay tribute to Philadelphia’s favorite hero of 2004, Smarty Jones. But fortunately the rains came and went before Smarty’s appearance. It’s hard to believe it’s been 15 years since ...

Summer is gearing down, the Hopeful and Del Mar Futurity have been run, and September means the beginning of fall. And the beginning of fall means 2-year-olds, and in this case a double dose of them. Of course you have to start ranking them with the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile in mind, but you also have to start looking at these babies as ...