Chris McGrath

Even in a market like this one, weirdly insulated from economic and geopolitical chaos, trading Thoroughbreds will always remain a precarious business. Speculators never hesitate, then, to pounce whenever the odds appear skewed temporarily in their favor. Sure enough, with the dollar squeezing other currencies dry, around one in eight of the yearlings sold at the Goffs Orby Sale this week is said to be heading to the U.S.; and they'll have plenty of company out of Tattersalls next week. To one who constantly berates breeders both sides of the...

Few people, anywhere in the world, will watch Europe's premier championship race on Sunday more avidly than Adam Bowden. His Diamond Creek Farm bred one of the leading fancies for the G1 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Onesto (Ire) (Frankel {GB}), and Bowden hopes to seize the moment by cashing in on his dam Onshore (GB) at Fasig-Tipton this November. It's just one remarkable vindication of the way Bowden has adapted an unusually precocious advent in the world of Standardbreds to a different environment; of a restless, questing mind that...

Traducción de Herman Guanipa La frase pertenece a Bob Hope, aparentemente cuando fue interrumpido por una persona que lo retó durante una alocución sobre moral militar para explicar por qué no estaba en uniforme. "¿No sabes que hay una guerra?" respondió. "¡Un chico podría lastimarse!" Habría sido perfectamente legítimo que uno de los subastadores de Keeneland respondiera de igual manera a la gran cantidad de pujas que llevó a la subasta de septiembre a niveles sin precedentes. De alguna forma, el tipo de factores que tradicionalmente llevan a los mercados...

In this business, simply "doing the math" would stop us right in our tracks. Luckily, we have algebra on our side. A daunting equation can always be rescued by that helpfully vague variable, 'x', the unquantifiable ardor of wealthy people: their competitive instinct, their sportsmanship, or simply their outsized egos. At the top of the market, after all, the dollars they spend are not the same as the dollars used by the rest of us to buy coffee or gas. It's not like "real" money at all. But that doesn't...

In this business, simply "doing the math" would stop us right in our tracks. Luckily, we have algebra on our side. A daunting equation can always be rescued by that helpfully vague variable, 'x', the unquantifiable ardor of wealthy people: their competitive instinct, their sportsmanship, or simply their outsized egos. At the top of the market, after all, the dollars they spend are not the same as the dollars used by the rest of us to buy coffee or gas. It's not like "real" money at all. But that doesn't...

Even as the British Turf grieves a revered sovereign and, in the same person, its most cherished and indispensable servant, I hope you'll forgive me for instead reflecting on the loss, only the day before, of someone she would have loved to be typical of all her subjects: a horseman, and true countryman, who divided his time between the international bloodstock circuit and an old rectory in rural Yorkshire. Whereas we knew that her great age was finally catching up with the monarch, James Delahooke's abrupt departure for a grouse...

The race is not always to the swift. Pretty old news, by this stage: it's right there in Ecclesiastes and, nearly as long ago now, you could see as much when More Than Ready cut the last corner in the Kentucky Derby. He transparently didn't get home, flattening into fourth behind Fusaichi Pegasus.

"You know, some of the people I go up against in the auction ring, they own countries," says Bobby Flay with a chuckle. "And I work at a stove." It's an instructive remark. For one thing, it indicates the humor and modesty that redeem the restauranteur and television chef from the kind of airs that might burden others, accustomed to turning heads in Main Street, on entering this arcane hinterland of ours. Flay so reliably checks the fame and glamor at the barn door, indeed, that you suspect he actually...

Our sport thrives on anticipation; our business, on outcomes. But actually it can take a while to unpick one from the other—especially when even a race as storied as the GI Travers S. is not just an end in itself, but also a potential means to viability for the whole program of whoever is lucky enough to own the winner.

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.

Polite but perfunctory. That was pretty much the tone in which people tended to praise Kitten's Joy while he was with us, and I guess it should be no different now that he's gone. Even so, it strikes me that his loss has been inadequately lamented. Not just in his own right, as an avowed turf stallion who freakishly contrived two general sires' championships in North America; but also, virtually unremarked, as a final straw in what has over the past nine months become an outright catastrophe for the enlightened...

Polite but perfunctory. That was pretty much the tone in which people tended to praise Kitten's Joy while he was with us, and I guess it should be no different now that he's gone. Even so, it strikes me that his loss has been inadequately lamented. Not just in his own right, as an avowed turf stallion who freakishly contrived two general sires' championships in North America; but also, virtually unremarked, as a final straw in what has over the past nine months become an outright catastrophe for the enlightened...