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All of Chad Summers’ horses had their heads out the stall anxiously awaiting dinner. One was pawing the ground, some were nickering, some were squealing. Well, all but one. In the end stall, Mind Your Biscuits had other things on his mind. The seventh race was going off and he peered intently out the back window taking in all the action. Even ...

They used to be scoffed at. There was a time when you heard the name New York-bred, you thought of second-class citizens not even remotely classy enough to compete with the big-name Kentucky-breds and Florida-breds or even worthy of being mentioned in the same breath. New York-bred races were looked upon as nothing more than claiming races without ...

The older I get the more Oscar Wilde’s words ring true – “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.” In many ways, my mind has not advanced at the same rate as my number of years. The feelings of youth burn just as brightly as they did when I was young. The passion and, in many ways, the naivety I still have when it ...

I won’t keep you in suspense, other than to say the premise of this column is a bit offbeat. The greatest horse of all time, if I may take the liberty, is Bob Baffert. Or to put it in equine terms, the greatest horse of all time, if I again may take the liberty, is Justamerigate. Or something to that effect. You see, Baffert, from 2015 to 2018, ...

With the Haskell Invitational the next big step on the 3-year-old calendar, this is a perfect time to go back 30 years to one of the greatest races I have ever seen. The 1988 Haskell had huge shoes to fill coming one year after the epic three-horse battle that featured Alysheba, Bet Twice, and Lost Code and forever stamped Monmouth’s premier ...

Many know the name James “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, but few know the story behind the training legend who spent 78 of his 91 years on the racetrack (see pg. 38). Fitzsimmons was a dominant trainer in New York during the middle of the 20th Century, and his barn annually swelled with top runners bred by Belair Stud and the Phipps family. After winning ...

Every year when the Triple Crown is concluded, we evaluate the stars who competed in the three races and try to determine which ones will be the horses to watch in the summer, mainly in the Haskell Invitational and Travers.Our thoughts also turn to the second wave of 3-year-olds, who were late developing and appear to be coming into their own, and ...

History is a never-ending chain of events, trends, and discoveries that determine how we think and look at the present, and often the future. When history tells us something cannot be accomplished, it provides us with new and seemingly unreachable targets at which to aim. And if and when that target is hit, it provides a sense of timelessness and ...

Muir Station Road, north of Lexington, runs from Paris Pike to Briar Hill Road. The road is an extension of the more-well-traveled Iron Works Pike, or Kentucky Route 1973. The week before the Belmont Stakes (G1), that makes us think of Secretariat and his definitive 31-length victory in the third leg of the Triple Crown in 1973.  At the ...

It was the morning of the 1988 Belmont Stakes and all was not well in the Belmont stakes barn, a four-sided barn encircling an English-style courtyard. In a corner of the barn, Risen Star’s troublesome ankle was being tubbed in ice, and it was still to be determined whether the handsome, strapping son of Secretariat would be able to run in the ...