BloodHorse.com

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') On July 6th last year, two days after Independence Day, Belmont Park hosted a moderately interesting race card that featured the Suburban Handicap (gr. II) and the Dwyer Stakes (gr. II). But thanks to some major race schedule changes and purse enhancements, this year’s Independence Day celebration (scheduled ...

On Saturday, Belmont Park will run two million-dollar races on the grass for 3-year-olds – the Belmont Derby and the Belmont Oaks. Both are expected to attract several top-class horses from Europe. Grass races designed to attract Europeans have spread throughout racetracks all across America, from the lucrative Arlington Million Day to big events ...

Following on from the earlier post on the racing class of the dam, we decided to take a look at the fluctuation in graded/group stakes winners over the first eight crops of a stallion's career. We took some 50 proven stallions and extracted out the number of graded stakes winners sired in each of their first eight crops. As you will note, they ...

The Grade 1 Mother Gooseby TimeformUS Analyst Mike BeerBelmont Park/June 28/Race 4/2:53 EDT: The Grade 1 Mother Goose has long been a fixture on the NYRA calendar, and pulling a list of previous winners of this historic race, one finds a veritable who's who of racing's most celebrated 3yo fillies. In all, nineteen fillies who would later be ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') While last weekend’s racing action was slow, with only a handful of graded stakes races being run across the country, this weekend promises to be much, much more exciting. All told, there are twelve graded stakes races scheduled to be run on Saturday alone, including a trio of grade I events. Furthermore, some ...

As we get ready for the start of the Northern Hemisphere yearling sales series, one of the more pertinent questions that we are often asked at TrueNicks is how important is the racing class of the pedigree at hand in determining the success of a mating. While the TrueNicks rating of a yearling can be the same, the chances of a stakes winner ...

Pat Riley, president of the Miami Heat, delivered some pretty inspirational comments to players on his team this past week, especially those who may be thinking about leaving the organization following the Heat’s five-game decimation at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs. “We’ve got to get a grip on greatness,” Riley said. “It’s about what ...

No debate regarding the use of the anti-bleeding drug furosemide (known as Salix or formerly Lasix) is complete without a call for more research.The Jockey Club pushed on this front during a recent meeting of the Kentucky Equine Drug Research Council, where it lobbied for a study to look at the effectiveness of Salix given at different time ...

Someone asked me today to send them a link to the column I wrote five years ago about Yeats’ record-breaking fourth Ascot Gold Cup victory. That got me thinking about this year’s Gold Cup, which awakened those same feelings I felt back in 2009. Watching the favored Leading Light, from the same Ballydoyle Stable as Yeats, outfight and outlast The ...