BloodHorse.com

By Jennifer Wirth, The Saturday Post Luck is an interesting thing.You find it when you least expect it.And, in some moments, luck finds you.In the case of Blind Luck, it arrives when you’re not looking. In April of 2007, a mare named Lucky One gave birth to a foal in Kentucky at Fairlawn Farm.The foal’s father, Pollard’s Vision, was blind in one ...

(Originally published in the August 14, 2010 issue of The Blood-Horse magazine. Feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions at the bottom of the column.)  By Eric MitchellIt’s easy to fall into the “racing is doomed” mentality. Handle nationwide is down, tracks have cut days because they don’t have enough horses, and the ...

It took nine years for Beth and Jasper Alexander, the owners of Hattie’s, to realize that their fried chicken dinners could taste great away from their Phila Street location.  Then they opened an outpost on Restaurant Row.  This summer, two years later, a new Hattie’s pushed Pat’s Saratoga Chicken stand into oblivion. The next frontier ...

Don’t ever believe that horse racing is anything other than the greatest game. The second larger-than-life, feel-good story of the young Saratoga meet unfolded in the Loudonville Stakes. The first featured the daughter of a sharecropper whose only horse triumphed in the Sanford Stakes. This one featured a man down on his luck and the ghost of a ...

There can be only two possible reasons for why the post position numbers 12, 13 and 14 are hung on the trees that are closest to the majority of people who venture near the walking ring to see the horses saddled. (1) Nobody gave thought to the idea that more people could watch these proceedings by placing the numbers one, two and three on these ...

Optimists will say that NYRA caught a break Thursday when Judge Barry D. Kramer, a former NBA basketball player, ruled that Aqueduct Entertainment Co. could not sue Lottery for excluding it from further consideration in the nine-year process to name a VLT operator for Aqueduct.  But pessimists will point out that Gov. Exit and the two ranking ...

Responding to pressures for new sources of revenue to fund the federal government, on Wednesday of this week the U.S. House of Representatives, Financial Services Committee, approved the “Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act” (H.R. 2267) by a vote of 41-22.  H.R. 2267 was introduced by committee chairman Rep. ...

This summer’s best Saratoga book is Saratoga in Bloom by Glens Falls, NY-born and raised author and photographer Janet Loughrey. Although Loughrey’s illustrated 176-page masterpiece is not about horses or horse racing per se, it reveals plenty of factoids relating to the subjects. For example, did you know that long ago the track converted some ...

(Originally published in the July 31, 2010 issue of The Blood-Horse magazine. Feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions at the bottom of the column.)  By Eric MitchellMonmouth Park’s great experiment may all be for naught. The Jersey Shore racetrack was told last year it needed to do something bold to prove that ...

If Charlie Hayward didn’t have bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.  First, the highway department advised the NYRA president that a lane of traffic at the Saratoga exit would be shut down for the first week of the meet.  Then he learned that a judge in Schenectady, NY won’t decide until next week if AEC, winners and, ultimately, losers ...