Chris McGrath

Though in most respects I only grow older, and no wiser, I do try nowadays not to get so cross about things. If I think people are breeding to the wrong horses, that's their prerogative. It's a difficult game; a still harder business. The Thoroughbred is reliable only as a vehicle of humility. We're all wrong far more often than we're right. And the beauty is that we have a proving ground out there, with a wooden post at the end. If you really are right, and I'm wrong, that's...

Red Smith put it well; of course he did. So well, in fact, that he said it all over again. In 1975, writing one of the pieces that won a Pulitzer Prize the following year, Smith declared that Kentucky Derby week was "the only one in 52 when the instrument of Satan known as horse racing becomes a showpiece of the American sports scene." Four years later, back at the same point in the cycle, he wrote that little old ladies in Wisconsin would this week be glad to learn...

Though yielding to few other Englishmen in stubbornly championing the merits of the speed-carrying dirt horse, I must admit that I have been somewhat less voluble over the past week. After so much anticipation, it felt like there were just too many Breeders' Cup races decided within strides of leaving the gate. Obviously track surface and configuration can often be a factor, but perhaps the proliferation of methods introduced from Quarter Horse training has also contributed to the times when dirt racing can appear lacking in subtlety. The GI Distaff,...

Now this, we can all agree, is just what a GI Longines Breeders' Cup Classic should look like. Three of the first four in the Derby, albeit not the one that may ultimately be credited as winner. And besides resolving the questions left open by that processional race at Churchill, they must also pick up the gauntlet thrown down by an older horse whose plain running style should leave no stone of merit unturned. A race, in other words, commensurate with the biggest prize of the American Turf, with the...

Nobody in our community is more eligible than Ted Bassett to say that he has seen it all before, but something will be attempted Saturday that falls outside even the long experience encompassed by his 100th birthday in just a few days' time. For a Keeneland showpiece that Mr. Bassett helped to inaugurate in 1984, as host to the lady for whom it was named, could well present one of her subjects with the opportunity to complete a unique double. First, in the backyard of Windsor Castle, William Haggas saddles...

He really had to earn his stripes, his farm resorting to pretty desperate measures to keep him in the game as his early books dwindled along with his fee. But he has long since vindicated (as well as virtually trademarked) that farm's management style, evolving into one of the great stallions of our time--a status on which he set a formal seal last weekend with his 100th stakes winner. And his name is... Into Mischief. Or is it? Hang on a minute. Syllable for syllable, you can say exactly the...

It is still relatively early days in his Turf adventure. But no matter how much Paul Farr can build on what is fast becoming a pretty serious commitment, he may never experience a more succinct sample of its ups and downs--and how bewilderingly entwined those tend to be--than his debut involvement in a graded stakes. That came just a few days ago, in the GIII Iroquois S. at Churchill: the first chance to bank starting points for a certain race staged on the same track next May. Time to start...

Surface tensions in our business have run pretty deep in recent years, nowhere more so than at Santa Anita. After a failed revolution, with a synthetic track, they eventually backed into a terrifying breakdowns crisis. Racing in California still has its problems, of course, not least the cloud currently over its premier barn--which, after that curious hesitation last week, instead gives its most controversial resident a home game Saturday in the GI Awesome Again S. But given our community's fury right now with another racetrack proprietor, who this week cashed...

Assuming that you, too, have by this stage marvelled at the tenacity, balance and athleticism of Alex Cruz in winning a race despite losing both irons leaving the gate, at Emerald Downs last weekend, then perhaps you might also have been prompted to reassess our prejudices against the seat of the 18th Century guardsman. To the modern eye, the long-shanked equitation of those days appears ludicrous: awkward, stilted and, above all, inimical to the freedom of the horse's movement. We think of the elevation of the modern jockey, as popularized...

After 40 years, and standing seventh in the all-time Churchill Downs win list, it looks as though Greg Foley might just be getting the hang of this training game. Heading into the fall, he has already won more prizemoney than in any campaign since starting out in 1981: $2,335,202 and counting, from 33 winners at 19%. And the bases are loaded, too. For instance, the pair that condensed Foley's maturing momentum in finally becoming his first and then immediately his second Derby starters, Major Fed (Ghostzapper) and O Besos (Orb),...

The cyclical nature of our business, from the foaling shed to the race program, invites a length of perspective that can only be of comfort in times of trouble. This, too, shall pass--even a global pandemic. And if COVID disrupted our routines in 2020 as seldom before, with a September Derby and no Saratoga Sale, we appear determined to make as seamless a resumption as its lingering challenges allow. Trade at Saratoga last month was eerily close to 2019. Of 180 hips into the ring for Fasig-Tipton's Select Sale, 135...

Three years ago this week, at the September Sale, I was privileged by as powerful a reminder as I'd enjoyed in a long time as to why this is such a great business. Not in the sale ring itself, watching the billionaires puffing out and locking antlers, but just sitting in the pavilion lobby with a guy who had been born in a one-room house to teenage parents--and had spent the intervening seven decades accumulating the kind of riches, being contingent on a mighty intellect and noble heart, that would...