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By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman Heading into this week, my tentative plan was to analyze the $600,000 Jim Dandy Stakes (gr. II) at Saratoga for today's column. But the race came up short on entries, and after handicapping the half-dozen runners, I landed on the Belmont Stakes (gr. I) runner-up Tacitus as my top ...

Fascinated by the coverage of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic trip to the moon, we wondered how The Blood-Horse chronicled that voyage back in July 1969. Neil Armstrong’s walk on the lunar surface late in the evening of July 20 didn’t get the column inches in print it did in general publications. After all, the Keeneland July yearling ...

King Lear, MacBeth, Henry IV, Maximum Security. The more Maximum Security races the more Shakespearean his career becomes. He now has surpassed Max's Hot Dogs as the most popular Max on the Jersey shore. But, boy, would Shakespeare have loved to write about this horse's adventures. How about The Tempest 2? After all, the definition ...

How many Thoroughbred owners would sell their soul to win a classic race; to reach the pinnacle of the sport; to attain immortality; to see the value of their horse soar into the tens of millions? For racing's aristocracy, the tycoons of business and pillars of society who ruled the Sport of Kings back in the early to mid-1900s, it was all ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman Saturday, July 20th will be a busy day of racing across North America, with plenty of action to keep an eye on at Saratoga and Del Mar. But by far the most anticipated race of the weekend is the $1 million Haskell Invitational (gr. I) at Monmouth Park. This 1 1/8-mile race will pit ...

The lamp of the Saratoga racing season had barely been lit when news came that Sea Hero, Paul Mellon’s homebred hero, had died in Turkey at the age of 29. Sea Hero’s score in the 1993 Travers Stakes (G1) is synonymous with the Spa as a statue of the horse is the centerpiece of the paddock. Not the most consistent horse—he only won six times in 24 ...

This one is personal. Come to think of it, perhaps it shouldn't be.  Racing has suffered a major blow this year due to the deaths of a number of horses at Santa Anita, which resulted in the surprising and controversial banishment of one of the sport's leading trainers, Jerry Hollendorfer. Many of those who have castigated racing and called ...

It was April 2, 1974. It should have been April 1, for what better April Fool’s joke than telling someone that a filly who had just finished second in a four-furlong maiden race at Fonner Park, a five-furlong bullring track in Grand Island, Nebraska would one day be crowned a champion and elected into the Hall of Fame.After all, any track run by ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman Who's ready for another summer of high-class racing at Saratoga? The much-anticipated 2019 summer meet kicked off earlier today, and the first Saturday of the meet will feature a couple of prominent graded stakes races. The fields might be small, but this is Saratoga, and upsets ...