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The text message from Josh Pons arrived Nov. 14 at 5:15 p.m. Hmm…knowing he wasn’t in town for the Keeneland November sale, we wondered what he was up to. The message read: “E: In a 1932 storage box, unopened since packed in NY in 1933 for shipment to his new farm in Md, is a file penciled on cover as ‘Unfinished.’ Inside, Saratoga sales memo to ...

The racing world is shrinking. We have seen horses from Europe come to the United States on a regular basis for years and win our top turf races, and on occasion top dirt races. This year alone we saw the sensational filly Enable become the first horse to win the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe and Breeders' Cup Turf in the same year, and we also ...

The weeping is over. The complaining fruitless. So just accept the direction Thoroughbred Racing is heading. The American Graded Stakes Committee is no doubt comprised of knowledgeable, intelligent people who know what they are doing and follow their formulas and equations with great awareness when juggling graded stakes, especially those rated ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman The Road to the Kentucky Derby continues on Saturday with the $250,000 Remsen Stakes (gr. II) at Aqueduct, a unique race that provides the only opportunity for North America's future Derby contenders to contest a nine-furlong graded stakes race during their two-year-old season. It's ...

Family holiday trips can take some horsepeople to a “no-man’s land” where racing and the Thoroughbred industry are off the grid. Case in point: a Thanksgiving spent in Chester, Vt. As quaint as New England quaint can be, with temperatures the lowest in generations (1 degree Thanksgiving morning) to add to the flavor, Southern Vermont is an ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! On this busy weekend of racing—arguably the last really big weekend of the year—there's graded stakes action from coast to coast and lots of high-class action to analyze. But since we're already happily trekking down to the Road to the 2019 Kentucky ...

In the days leading up to the 1979 Belmont Stakes, with Spectacular Bid having dominated his opposition in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, if someone had asked you to give thanks that we were about to witness a Triple Crown winner, you might have been inclined to laugh in their face.“Big deal,” you might have said. “So we have another ...

In addition to the glamour of the Triple Crown season and the summer joys of Saratoga and Del Mar, there is plenty of horse business to be had in late November, both on the track and in the sale ring. Veteran Turf writer Bob Ehalt takes us back to the glory days of late-autumn racing at Meadowlands. Living in New York and New Jersey in the 1980s ...

Thoroughbred racing’s Golden Age, as we know it, was the decade of the ‘70s when we had three Triple Crown winners, as well as equine heroes such as Ruffian, Forego, Spectacular Bid, Alydar, and the rags to riches Canonero II.But to our parents’ generation, racing’s Golden Age were the years following Word War II when the Sport of Kings got back ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman On this fairly quiet weekend of racing, I imagine that most of us are already looking ahead to the 2019 Kentucky Derby and are busily analyzing race entries and results in search of promising two-year-olds who could make a big impact on the Derby trail this winter. So with this in ...