Chris McGrath column

The group we consider today for now retains a convenient gloss, still in the happy position of offering "all talk, no action." But they will actually have got as far as delivering their first flesh-and-bone foals into the straw by the time they start receiving their second book of mares. And many of the people who exploited their novelty value last year will automatically have moved on to the next intake of rookies, rather than expose themselves to the peril that the market won't like a debut crop. Foals conceived...

He hasn't got all day; nor, doubtless, do you. So let's cut to the chase. We won't dwell on the journey that has made Dr. Larry Bramlage a doyen of orthopedic science, in its daily application to the racehorse: not the alphabet soup of honors and distinctions, nor the long experience that has honed the sharpest diagnostic eye in the business through 23 years with Rood and Riddle. We have simply dropped into the clinic, on a recent visit to Lexington, to direct a brief sunbeam of his knowledge and...

I guess the whole point is that ours is a world apart, a sanctuary from the cares of the "real" one. But it still feels unnerving, to see a new cycle of the sales calendar open with such blithe indifference to a wider consensus that the global economy is scrabbling along the top of a precipice. Both Saratoga and Deauville benefit from a heady atmosphere that might easily induce a perilous incaution when a yearling stands there shimmering on a sale rostrum. But it was ever thus, and the market...

How poignant that, in this of all weeks, the two most breathtaking winners on Belmont day should both have prompted comparisons with Ghostzapper, whose GI Breeders' Cup Classic at Lone Star Park in 2004 was surely the greatest Thoroughbred performance ever on Texan soil. Because while the whole racing world came to Dallas that day, it appears that there will be no reciprocal embrace when it comes to the standards sought—not just federally, but internationally—to give American horseracing credibility in the contest for public engagement in the 21st Century. It's...