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It is appropriate that the New York Racing Association moved the Kelso Handicap from its fall Super Saturday card, where it was pretty much lost, to its own weekend. Now the focus is not only on those versatile horses prepping for either the Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile or the Classic, but on one of the all-time great Thoroughbreds for whom the ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman With a purse of $1 million, Saturday's Pennsylvania Derby (gr. I) at Parx Racing has attracted some of the best three-year-olds currently in training. ''Currently,'' of course, is the key word, since many of the division leaders (Country House, Sir Winston, Game Winner, and now ...

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 ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman How time flies! It seems like yesterday we were hashing out the controversial outcome of the 2019 Kentucky Derby, and now here we are just two days away from the start of the Road to the 2020 Kentucky Derby. The much-anticipated series kicks off on Saturday with the $200,000 ...

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 ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman You have to give the New York Racing Association some credit. By inaugurating three new stakes races worth a combined $2.05 million and scheduling them for Saturday, September 7, they've taken a typically quiet post-Labor Day racing weekend and turned it into a can't-miss showpiece ...

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 ...