On Saturday, July 5, Monmouth Park will host the United Nations Stakes, a Grade I turf test for horses three years and older contested at 1 3/8 miles. On Saturday, July 12, Belmont Park will host the Man O’ War Stakes, a Grade I turf test for horses three years and older contested at 1 3/8 [.....

Wednesday, as the escalator bore me down to the paddock at Monmouth, an email buzzed my Iphone: “Congratulations, Erin and Frank!” it began. A scan brought good news: our filly The Big Four Oh is pregnant. Names are already chosen, male and female, lodging already secured for her and her...

In a week with plenty going on — Congressional hearings, major races (including the Queen’s Plate and Colonial Turf Cup), and the possibility that anti-drug horsemen Larry Jones and Jim Squires may have been framed in a recent drug positive (here, and a tip of the cap to the Paulick Report...

You knew the fix was in for yesterday’s hearings on Capitol Hill regarding horse racing as soon as the title of the hearing was released: “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred.” And any lingering doubts one may have...

It’s the oldest game in the world: blaming somebody else. In horse racing, it has a long and honored history. Trainers think that all jocks are pinheads and that most lost races are the result of the pinheads’ propensity to make bad decisions. Jockeys get horses buried down at the rail, or...

With Congress breathing down its neck, the racing industry, in the form of Racing Commissioners International, has gathered and released statistics on deaths among rachorses (including thoroughbreds, standardbreds, and quarter horses). How you interpret those statistics, of course, determines whether...

A lot of recent talk out in the blogosphere about how the NTRA should have aggressively marketed Curlin’s return to the US in yesterday’s Stephen Foster (here’s our friend Dana on the topic). I disagree. Well, truthfully, I halfway agree. I’d have loved to see some real juice...

A subcommittee of the US House of Representatives has set June 19 as the date for a hearing titled, “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Racing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse.” Not that the game is rigged or anything. Obviously, some of the members have...

“All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, and the same can be said of Triple Crown aspirants: all of the 11 successful ones resemble each other, while the near-misses… well, they all have their distinctive...

There were several foregone conclusions Belmont day. But the one we’d been promised — that Big Brown would win the Belmont Stakes and secure the first Triple Crown in 30 years — turned out not to be one of them. It was, however, a foregone conclusion that trainer Rick Dutrow would point...