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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 ...

The late John Gaines was a master of many phases of the Thoroughbred industry: breeding, racing, and selling. Part of his marketing genius in the 1980s was to invest in older mares that had produced several stakes performers and breed them to one of the many stallions he had at his Gainesway Farm, so when the foals hit the yearling sales the ...

By J. Keeler Johnson (''Keelerman'') Twitter: @J_Keelerman It's not every week that I single out a listed stakes race as the feature race for an Unlocking Winners blog post, much less a rather obscure one-mile turf race at Aqueduct on a quiet weekend in November. But when I examined the entries for the $150,000 Artie Schiller Stakes—a race ...

Most owners, trainers, and racing fans were tricked by the Halloween deluge in Louisville, Ky., that dumped several inches of rain on the main track and turf course at Churchill Downs. However, the sport sure got a treat once the horses hit the track for the Nov. 2-3 Breeders’ Cup. The main track dried out under a wind-whipped autumn day, and the ...