Chris McGrath

I'm pinning my faith in Happy Jack. Not to win, obviously, even after a Derby so outlandish that it still confounds the handicapper's genius for rationalizing the most unaccountable events with the invincible benefit of hindsight. As a Calumet homebred by Oxbow, however, you can certainly envisage this fellow proceeding to the GI Belmont S. and so ensuring that at least one horse has contested each leg of the Triple Crown--which would, dismally, be one more than was managed last year even by a crop containing Oxbow's outstanding son to...

I'm pinning my faith in Happy Jack. Not to win, obviously, even after a Derby so outlandish that it still confounds the handicapper's genius for rationalizing the most unaccountable events with the invincible benefit of hindsight.

Well, I guess it's precisely because the protagonists aren't used to the limelight that everybody has so enjoyed their arrival at center stage. But they have quickly learned that once there, with everyone hanging on your every word, you had better know your script.

Well, I guess it's precisely because the protagonists aren't used to the limelight that everybody has so enjoyed their arrival at center stage. But they have quickly learned that once there, with everyone hanging on your every word, you had better know your script. In the excitement of his success, under one of the most remarkable rides in GI Kentucky Derby history, connections of Rich Strike (Keen Ice) told everyone that they had the previous morning been reconciled to instead contesting the GIII Peter Pan S. at Belmont this weekend....

Somehow they had got it into their heads that it might be nice to buy "a small, gentleman's farm", just 10 acres or so, as an eventual retirement project. Jana Barbe's daughters, emulating her own childhood passion, had always enjoyed riding and some of the show horses were kept here in Kentucky. Such a beautiful part of the world, they hired a local broker and did some idle prospecting. Then came the 2008 crash. "And this business, being built on disposable income, suffered terribly," Barbe recalls. "Suddenly it felt like...

We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of "modernization"—a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment.

(Listen to this story by clicking the play button below.) [audio mp3="https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/202204-v1-This-Side-Up-April-15.mp3"][/audio] We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of "modernization"--a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment. Nobody can sensibly deny that a great deal of change has indeed been for the better. Few who honor her memory at Keeneland on Saturday, I'm sure, would like to have been...

You can do all those other things, if you like: expensive supplements and therapies, scans and samples. But none of it will do the slightest good unless your horse can trust its weight to the soles of its four feet. Last September, veteran horseman G.W. Parrish was as usual scouting the later books at the Keeneland September sale for yearlings to pinhook through the small farm he operates at High Springs, Florida, along with wife Karen and daughter Kristin. In the Gainesway consignment, he came across a gray colt by...

There was a time when you would load as much experience and conditioning as possible into a Kentucky Derby horse, as a mere adolescent required to jostle with 19 others through 10 furlongs. Nowadays, however, trainers are trying to reach Churchill Downs across a highwire stretched to a thread by two diametrically opposed imperatives. One is their conviction, whether through perception or presumption, that the typical, commercial-bred Thoroughbred of today can only stand up to a much lighter schedule. The other is to secure enough gate points in the trials.

There was a time when you would load as much experience and conditioning as possible into a Kentucky Derby horse, as a mere adolescent required to jostle with 19 others through 10 furlongs. Nowadays, however, trainers are trying to reach Churchill Downs across a highwire stretched to a thread by two diametrically opposed imperatives. One is their conviction, whether through perception or presumption, that the typical, commercial-bred Thoroughbred of today can only stand up to a much lighter schedule. The other is to secure enough gate points in the trials....

First things first: let's give their chance to the guys off the bench. Okay, so there are going to be plenty of eyeballs rolled now that three of Bob Baffert's four Derby migrants are joining a former assistant, on the same circuit, with a total of 38 starters to his name this year—especially as it was the handling of another Baffert medication violation that reportedly caused the scuffle between this same gentleman and a fellow trainer at Clocker's Corner one morning last April. (Both were fined $500.)