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Over the last 50 years, racing has trended towards ''speed'' to the detriment of ''stamina.''  The obvious casualty of the speed bias is non-sprint race distances. And over the past half-century, we've seen more and more tracks re-defining their signature races by cutting the distance asked of the runners. More insidiously, everyday races -- ...

This weekend I have seven horses racing from my virtual stable at www.roadtotheroses.com. It is the last chance for a few of my horses to make a convincing move for the Kentucky Derby presented by Yum Brands!  Show me the money (so they qualify).War Pass, Court Vision, Giant Moon, Tale of Ekati, Anak Nakal, El Gato Malo and Z Humor are in my ...

The obvious highlight of the day was the majestic display by Curlin (Smart Strike - Sherriff's Deputy, by Deputy Minister) in the Eminates Airline Dubai World Cup (UAE-I), but the day produced several other interesting pedigrees. Curlin himself is an A++ nick, the Smart Strike/Deputy Minister cross having produced four stakes winners including - ...

Alan analyzes first-crop sires of 2-year-olds represented at the Keeneland April sale in a featured article in The Blood-Horse Data Digest (preview below). If you'd like to follow along in the Keeneland catalog while reading, it's available here. Coming into the Keeneland April 2-year-olds in training sale, TrueNicks turns its eye on the ...

We were sufficiently impressed by Big Brown's devastating Florida Derby (gr. I) win that we went straight to TrueNicks to have a look at the pedigree. The TrueNicks rating is always updated overnight, but when we looked at the pedigree on Saturday afternoon, the page reflected the state of play before Big Brown's win (see attached). Therefore, ...

Last week, I talked about a few of my favorite pedigrees in the Keeneland April sale of 2-year-olds in training. For anyone interested in that sale (or just fascinated by sire lists and anything data-related), The Blood-Horse is offering a free download of the Data Digest for this sale.  In addition to top sires and broodmare sires, top ...

When a highly-inbred horse does well on the track and is bred to outcrosses, watch out, world! I responded to a comment in an earlier post that a mare with considerable inbreeding often yields superior runners when she's outcrossed, but will generally fare poorly at the track herself.  When a filly with close-up pedigree ...

[image url=''http://cdn.bloodhorse.com/images/content/henneganbrothers_large.jpg'']John & Brad Hennegan[/image] After working for others for too many years, Long Island, New York natives and brothers John and Brad Hennegan quit their jobs and started working for themselves on a project that they believed in. Their goal was to make horse ...

The final results of the poll are in! Surprisingly, Point Given won by a large margin, garnering more than 30% of the votes. I was a bit surprised, not that you guys voted him the winner, but that he won by so much. I bet that if we took this poll again in six months, Curlin's votes would go way up! Thanks to everyone who voted. Since we had ...

  Like everybody else who watched the Florida Derby, my initial reaction to the dominating performance of Big Brown was, ''Wow!'' Several factors made the five-length victory so impressive: A) The fact that his time of 1:48.16 was less than a half-second off the track record, and was nearly a full second faster than Barbaro's winning ...