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Holy Bull peered out his stall at Keeneland at the steady stream of visitors from around the country, many with their children, who had come to trainer Jimmy Croll’s barn to get a glimpse at racing’s newest sensation and hot favorite for the Kentucky Derby. As he cocked his ears and posed for photos, he was greeted with a series of oohs and ...

By Mandy Haskin In light of the Steve Asmussen-Scott Blasi furor, my daughter has addressed the subject much better than I ever could, and through eyes a lot more innocent than mine. She wrote it just for me to read, but I feel it is something that needs to be shared When you grow up in horse racing from the time you were a ...

Boy, am I being influenced by television lately. First American Idol spawns a column on Wise Dan and now “Horseplayers,” mainly Team Rotondo (Peter Rotondo Sr. and Jr. and Lee Davis) and John Conte, brings me back to a time long ago in my life; a time of smoke-filled busses and a cacophony of thick Brooklyn accents moaning about the double ...

Here we go again. I had absolutely zero plans on writing or even thinking about Wise Dan in the heat of the Derby trail. Who needs all the retorts that accompany it? I don’t consider myself a glutton for punishment. But then I was watching American Idol and another hair-brained analogy for a column popped into my head. It’s basically the same ...

A dates compromise between Calder Casino & Race Course and Gulfstream Park might have been expected after the two South Florida racetracks—located only eight miles apart—began racing head-to-head on weekends last July. Calder might have seemed most eager for a truce since the Miami Gardens track has suffered the harshest blows during this ...

By Ed DeRosa One of racing’s great ironies is the common lament, “I don’t regard weight to handicap races” (or some such). In today’s parlance, “to handicap a race” usually means to figure out who’s going to win (or what chance each horse has of winning), but the origin of the term has to do with assigning weight to horses in a race. Weight ...

A set of young 2-year-olds strutting across a grassy field in pairs, as dripping strands of Spanish moss hang over their heads. It is the summer of 1965 and Ocala, Fla. is alive with a new crop of Thoroughbreds. The area, rich in limestone, is still in its fledgling stages that year as an alternative to the Kentucky bluegrass. In 1943, ...