Fair grounds Stakes Schedule

Louisiana's Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots will host 73 black-type races worth a combined $9.7 million during the upcoming 76-day 2023-24 Thoroughbred meet, officials at the New Orleans oval announced Wednesday. The amount is up $1.2 million from last year, but does include $1 million in base purses offered Dec. 2 as Fair Grounds hosts the 25th annual Claiming Crown. That event returns to Fair Grounds for the first time since 2011 with purses ranging from $75,000 to $200,000. Another $25,000 in each race will be available in purse...

From his desk in the racing office, Stuart Slagle views stakes coordination as a vocation that is part sales and part diplomacy, but for him, it is also part science. As a former academic who received a B.S. in Zoology at the University of Texas in Austin and studied biophysics at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana before working with supercomputers as a system engineer, his approach to filling a stakes race is always interspersed with the scientific method and predictive analytics. "There is nothing like pursuing the science of...