Jack Sisterson looked out the plane window as he approached Louisville Airport in 2002 and saw his life unfold right before him. The native of Durham, England, who grew up with horses, as a jockey and show jump rider, had been offered a soccer scholarship by the University of Louisville and was looking...

This story appeared in the May 22, 2004 issue of Blood-Horse magazine Get the golden coach ready; we're heading to the ball again. After so many failed attempts, maybe this time Smarty Jones can fit into that elusive glass slipper, and Thoroughbred racing and the Visa Triple Crown finally can live happily...

The following story first appeared in the April 28, 2007 issue of Blood-Horse magazine, with a few additions thrown in. This feature, about Team Smarty and what became of everyone, will kick off our “Smarty Jones Tribute Week,” in preparation for his departure for Uruguay next month. Each day we will...

Two days before the May 21 Preakness Stakes (gr. I), trainer Dale Romans was standing outside the fence by the grazing area telling Shackleford’s co-owners and breeders Mike Lauffer and Bill Cubbedge how revved up their colt was since arriving at Baltimore the day before. As he spoke, Shackleford was...

Steve Haskin's Look Back at the Decade Editors of The Blood-Horse challenged senior correspondent Steve Haskin to fill in the blanks on several “best of” lists for the decade of 2000-2009. While several of them appear in the Dec. 26/Jan. 2 combined issue of the magazine (mailing on Dec. 29), there wasn...

The day before the 130th Preakness Stakes (gr. I), jockey Jeremy Rose said of Afleet Alex, "This horse will run over broken glass if I ask him to." Several weeks earlier at Churchill Downs, Liz Scott, mother of Alexandra "Alex" Scott, the 4-year-old girl who started the now-famous "Alex's Lemonade Stand...

As the Kentucky Derby hoopla began to quiet down, a stunned racing world was still trying to recover from the bombshell that had fallen on Churchill Downs. An obscurely bred, crooked legged, harlequin of a horse from Venezuela, who had been ridiculed by the press and local horsemen, had just concluded...

The day after the 1987 Preakness Stakes, I stopped at a service area on I-95 in Maryland on my way back home from the Preakness and called Jack Van Berg, asking if I could do a feature on him for the Thoroughbred Times, which had only been in existence for about a year. I had never met Van Berg, who...