Chris McGrath

With so much background noise over the tragic Medina Spirit (Protonico), few have given due attention to another poignant context for the potential elevation of Mandaloun (Into Mischief) as official winner of the 2021 GI Kentucky Derby. If the next name on the roll of honor happens to be Call Me Midnight (Midnight Lute), however, then perhaps more of us will renew our gratitude to the late Prince Khalid Abdullah for a legacy well measured by the performance of both horses at Fair Grounds last Saturday. The founder of Juddmonte...

In terms of the luck so indispensable on the GI Kentucky Derby trail, Carl and Yurie Pascarella are perfectly aware that they have used up a lot of "credit". Certainly they know just how fortunate they were, to have been in the Team Valor partnership that won the race in 2011 with Animal Kingdom (Leroidesanimaux {Brz}). And prior to that, Carl was CEO of Visa during its hugely successful association with the Triple Crown series, between 1995 and 2005 offering a $5-million bonus to anyone who could slake the industry's...

Fastest two minutes in sport? You'll excuse us a bitter laugh here. By the time Mandaloun (Into Mischief) leaves the gate Saturday for the GIII Louisiana S., he'll be 382,968 minutes into a GI Kentucky Derby without end. And, with no sign of anyone putting their attorneys back in the holster, it's plainly going to be a while yet before we know whether Mandaloun will finally be anointed the 147th winner of a race that drives so many millions of dollars of investment in our industry. (Listen to this column...

You would think the heart has enough on its plate. It literally never gets a break, not for one second, never mind a vacation. Never a morning's fishing, a bourbon after dinner. Yet somehow we have ended up charging this most vital of our organs with a second burden, figurative but scarcely less momentous, as the vessel of love. So when the tireless engine of life finally fails, in one we cherish, we speak of our own hearts as being "broken." And there were many such, in Lexington on Friday,...

No matter what privileges or disadvantages we take into the starting gate, and no matter how many circuits we get to run, all of us ultimately pull up at the same finishing line. But it is not just that humbling reckoning, reached within days of each other, that united Billy Turner and Josephine Abercrombie. Their lives, though wildly contrasting, were animated by the same bond of vitality that sustains many who grieve them. "Mrs. A.", as she was known to those blessed by her friendship or patronage, embraced the extraordinary...

The new year could scarcely have opened in more familiar fashion, with Bob Baffert not only winning the GIII Sham S. for an eighth time but replicating what had meanwhile become a bitterly poignant 1-2 in the race last year. Hopefully the names of Newgrange (Violence) and Rockefeller (Medaglia d'Oro) will not end 2022 quite so explosively freighted as those of Life Is Good (Into Mischief) and Medina Spirit (Protonico), whose respective transfer and tragedy have meanwhile become so expressive of the travails not only of their trainer, but of...

As a year of unprecedented achievement draws to a close, the distribution of laurels among our champion stallions must first and foremost celebrate their sheer potency. For while we already know Into Mischief to be a phenomenon, he demands fresh admiration in sealing his third consecutive general sires' championship with a prizemoney haul just shy of $25 million, shattering the $22,507,940 record he set in his second; the work of 260 winners, similarly raising the bar giddily on the 221 who compiled his first. As the revelation of the year,...

In reaching the penultimate instalment of our series, once again we are obliged by the steepening commercial gradient to combine different intakes--this time, those who have now launched between four and six juvenile crops--to ensure a suitably competitive podium. For by this stage of their career the majority of Kentucky start-ups will already have packed their bags for regional or overseas programs. One or two are still barely clinging on, their books plummeting, but overall we're now looking at those few who have bravely consolidated to the brink of inclusion...

This can be a terrifying business. Here we are, for the first time in this series, assessing stallions that have at least put some sophomores through the starting gate. And already, commercially, the game appears to be up for many. So much so, in fact, that to give adequate competitive depth to our value podium, we're going to combine the consecutive intakes who were in 2021 respectively contesting the second- and third-crop championships. Here's just one example of how ruthless the market is. I won't name the stallion, because he...

They say it's an ill wind that blows no good and, sure enough, consoling fragments of human kindness were strewn even among the deadly havoc in Western Kentucky last week. But besides the substantial gestures of solidarity from the Bluegrass, including the auctioning of a live foal season to a Triple Crown winner, disasters like this also tend to leave glinting in their wake tiny shards of the life force by which our species has achieved viability amidst its volatile habitat. The tattered photograph of two smiling children, for instance,...

Ever get the feeling that somebody up there doesn't like us very much? Of all of the horses, in all of the world... But really it doesn't make any difference, however you interpret the tragedy of Medina Spirit (Protonico). The net result, for our community, is the same--whether you think the whole melodrama unfolded, entirely and lucklessly, at random; or was somehow determined by our own culpable behaviors. Whoever is writing these scripts, we have been cast in the same role. We are being tested. And if we don't get...

Even last year, when doing so much to fortify breeders through the uncertainties of the pandemic, stallion farms appeared to price their rookies to squeeze the usual juice from the commercial market's greatest addiction. That was fair enough. Nowadays farm accountants can bank only on the most fleeting of vogues in drawing up a business plan for stallion acquisitions. And nor can we sensibly expect any slack now, pending the arrival of first foals and then a debut at the weanling sales next fall. A stallion has to be in...