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By Wandering Eyes · Posted
What will racing look like in 10 years? We asked some of racing's best and brightest to give us their predictions. Want to submit an answer? Email suefinley@thetdn.com CARRIE BROGDEN, MACHMER HALL First of all, I am an eternal optimist by nature. With a game-changing program in the works by 2036, I believe that you will see a complete reversal in the gargantuan problem we currently face with aftercare. I am beyond sick of seeing all the ISO posts on social media wanting to buy riding horses but the last two words in almost ever ad ends in 'NO THOROUGHBREDS'. I mean, what other breed of horse sells 16.2 hands high, fancy and sound geldings for $3,500? The answer is none. Only the Thoroughbred does. They have become the pariah of the show hunter world. They have no value because there is no demand for them. It is like going into an animal shelter and seeing that all there are for adoption are pit bulls because only the hard core breed enthusiasts actually want them. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Thoroughbreds dominated show hunters, jumpers and eventers. We even had non-Thoroughbred classes because there were so few other breeds! An analysis of the Show Jumpers Hall of Fame revealed that 18 of its 20 inductees were Thoroughbreds–highlighting their former dominance. But as warmbloods grew in popularity due to their rideability, placid demeanor, etc., many top trainers shifted their focus and owners largely stopped investing in Thoroughbreds to ride. We need to make owning and riding second career Thoroughbreds cool and lucrative again. I am on the USHJA Thoroughbred Task Force with amazing dedicated and passionate people and we are proposing and developing the creation of a long-term incentive program designed to reverse this trend and re-establish the Thoroughbred alongside the warmblood as a competitive and desirable sport horse. The response to those I have pitched it to on both racing/riding Thoroughbred world has literally been overwhelming and I am often giddy with joy thinking about the potential. The problem with second careers is not the horses, it is the demand for them. I mean have you ever heard of a fundraiser for a warmblood retirement farm? We are designing and creating a Hunter Derby series of classes exclusively for Thoroughbreds competing in existing rated USEF horse shows. I am talking about $75,000 classes, which includes OBSCENE prize money in the riding horse world and not even the purse for a maiden special weight at Turfway Park in the race world– culminating in a $200,000 Thoroughbred-only final. The goal is to create a program strong enough to endure. I was inspired by Mr. Gaines vision for the Breeders Cup. We have the Thoroughbred world racehorse championships. Why can we not have the Thoroughbred equestrian championships giving both sides of their careers importance and value? Start with the show hunters, then the jumpers, then the eventers, etc. The Thoroughbred Renaissance series is what I see! Offering high-dollar, Thoroughbred-only classes and a championship will capture the attention of leading hunter trainers, encourage reinvestment in Thoroughbreds and demonstrate to racehorse trainers and owners the value of second careers for these horses. Can you imagine the ripple effect? TOP hunter jumper trainers and riders would be posting ISOs of a THOROUGHBRED! Demand would skyrocket literally overnight. Geldings and fillies coming off the track would be scouted well before “that one last race.” The doors would open and every top riding barn in the country would be seeking Thoroughbreds off the track for its second career to develop. If we build it and fund it…they will come. We can create a THOROUGHBRED ECOSYSTEM so by 2036 our horses are valued and beloved during their racing careers and after. ARNOLD BERGER In the next 10 years, racing must face very difficult times if it does not change all the different regulations throughout the country, also the structure of purses and state breeding programs must combine all their resources As a lifelong fan who saw Secretariat defeat Key to the Mint in the Garden State Stakes in 1972 the stands if I remember there where 30,000 fans in the stands. Only time you see that today is very few days. There should be a national breeding and reimbursement plan for all tracks and horsemen to share in as there will fewer tracks, notably Gulfstream and Santa Anita will be gone for the land is too expensive to keep as a race track, unless a national syndicate of owners, farms, and states get together to buy the facilities. Sorry to be so negative, but I also saw simulcasting 25 years ago causing loss of interest in going to tracks. The post Racing In 2036: Carrie Brogden and Arnold Berger appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
When it was announced last week that former New York Post racing columnist Ray Kerrison had been selected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame's Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, New York horseplayers of a certain age had to be smiling. There have been plenty of gifted and talented men and women who have covered the sport over the years, but there's never been anyone like Ray Kerrison. He was fearless, a tremendous reporter, unafraid of whom he might alienate and was a fierce advocate for the $2 bettor. “It was never about him,” his son Patrick told me when his father passed in 2022 at the age of 92. “He was extraordinarily humble. He was very protective of the $2 bettor. When he came on the racing scene on Jan. 1, 1977, the other turf writers did not like him and neither did racing personnel, trainers, jockeys. That's because it was very insular and the turf writers acted more like publicity agents as opposed to investigative journalists. What my dad did upset a lot of people. He didn't care. He just wanted to protect the bettors and he wanted everything to be on a level playing field. That's how he was with everything in his life.” A native of Australia, he was working as the editor for Rupert Murdoch's The National Star in his native country. In late 1976, Murdoch bought the Post and asked Kerrison to come over and spearhead the tabloid's racing coverage. Though that's not all that long ago, things could not have been more different then when it came to the relationship between New York racing and the city's two raucous tabloids, the Post and the New York Daily News, whose star was the prolific handicapper and writer Russ Harris. Both papers covered the sport extensively, realizing that, especially with the opening of New York City OTB, their readers wanted to know what was going on at the track. Now, there's not a single daily metropolitan paper in New York or elsewhere, that covers the sport. The rare exception might be a wire service story around the time of the GI Kentucky Derby. While Kerrison excelled in all aspects, his greatest strength was his reporting skills. He broke stories on some of the biggest scandals in the sport's history and was once nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Had he worked on some other beat and for a high-brow paper like the New York Times or the Washington Post, he certainly would have won a Pulitzer, and maybe more than one. His biggest scoop was when he helped to uncover the Lebon-Cinzano betting scandal. In May of 1977, Dr. Mark Gerard, a New York-based vet, purchased two horses in Uruguay. One, Cinzano, was a champion. The second, Lebon, was a perpetual also-ran. Because the two horses looked alike, Gerard figured there would be no problem switching their identities. Racing under the name of Lebon, Cinzano made his debut in September of 1977 in a $10,000 claimer. He ran up the track, most likely because Gerard did something to ensure that the horse would run poorly and knew that would drive his odds up for his next race. Lebon/Cinzano's next start was on Sept. 22 at Belmont. The horse won easily, paying $116 to win. Reportedly, Gerard's winning bets amounted to $77,920. He might have gotten away with it if not for that fact that a Uruguayan racing journalist saw the picture of “Lebon” and told U.S. authorities that he was positive that the horse in the winner's circle was not Lebon, but likely Cinzano. But it was Kerrison who picked up on the story in the U.S. and put the final nails in Gerard's coffin. Kerrison also wrote repeatedly about what was another black eye for New York racing during his time at his keyboard. Oscar Barrera was doing things that had never been done before in racing and seemed to be able to do the impossible. He would claim a horse on a Saturday for $10,000, run it back the next Thursday for $25,000 and it would win for fun. Like everyone else watching New York racing at the time, Kerrison knew that Barrera's success was too good to be true. When it came to Barrera, Kerrison often used the term “Miracle Man.” His sense of irony and disgust was evident and he likely knew that Barrera's feats had nothing to do with miracles, but to do with whatever drugs he was pumping into his horses. Kerrison believed that Barrera was using milkshakes, alkalinizing agents that kept horses from getting fatigued. But he saved his fiercest criticism for what was then known as the New York Racing and Wagering Board, which, he felt, did not do nearly enough to try to catch Barrera and bring a stop to the mockery he was making of New York racing. In 1988, Barrera was finally caught, though for a drug that probably wasn't potent enough to explain his “miracles.” But after he got a 1988 suspension for prednisone, Barrera went on an 0-for-138 streak. Kerrison wrote that the stable's performance had gone from “red hot to ice water” overnight. Kerrison and fellow racing writer John Piesen, another racing scribe who worked for the Post, helped break the story of the biggest race-fixing scam in New York history. “Racing's Darkest Hour” was the Post's headline. Kerrison's reporting played a key role in uncovering the scandal that led to charges being brought against jockey Con Errico, mobster Anthony Ciulla, and more than 20 others for fixing races during the mid-seventies. In the late eighties, Kerrison largely stepped away from the racing beat and took on a new job as a news side columnist for the Post. He did, however, continue to cover the Triple Crown and Breeders' Cup races and write about major racing stories until he retired from the paper in 1993. There will never again be another Ray Kerrison. Newspapers have abandoned racing and all that is left is a handful of trade publications, most of them trying to get by with small budgets and small staffs, staffs that don't include investigative reporters The sport, and especially the $2 bettor, was lucky to have had Ray Kerrision. Why I Voted for Flavien Prat This year's race for the Eclipse Award-winning jockey may be the most competitive ever. Flavien Prat and Irad Ortiz, Jr. have both had spectacular years, and neither deserves to lose. To show just how close the race is, through Dec. 20, Ortiz's mounts have earned $39,982,010, while Prat is just behind him at $39,378,081. It seems that voters look first at money earned before casting their votes for champion jockey, so Ortiz may have a slight edge. Flavien Prat | Sarah Andrew But take a deeper dive and you can make a pretty solid case that Prat had the better year of the two. He accepted 374 fewer mounts than Ortiz did, the major reason why his average earnings per mount figure is much better than that of his rival. Prat has made $32,356 per start, much better than Ortiz's figure of $25,130. Prat has also won 45 graded stakes to 36 for Ortiz. Prat has won 12 Grade I stakes, three more than Ortiz. Prat also deserves extra credit for what he has done at Aqueduct during the fall. Prat set a NYRA record by winning seven races on a single card at Aqueduct Racetrack on Nov. 2, 2025. Turfway Deserved Better from Graded Stakes Committee While I am the first to say that there are still way too many graded stakes run in this country and that TOBA has to start making drastic cuts to the list of graded stakes, there's at least one instance where the Graded Stakes Committee has not done enough to reward a surging racetrack in the surging state of Kentucky. Sunday's card at Turfway, featured four ungraded stakes that were wiped out eight days earlier due to weather issues. The four–the My Charmer Stakes, the Holiday Inaugural Stakes, the Prairie Bayou Stakes and the Holiday Cheer Stakes–were worth a combined $1 million and attracted a total of 51 horses, many of them top-quality campaigners. These races were easily Grade III events, if not Grade II, and the American Graded Stakes Committee needs to rectify that mistake the next chance it gets. The post The Week in Review: A Well-Deserved Honor, Ray Kerrison is Inducted into Media Wing of Hall of Fame appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
The opening day card at Santa Anita's Classic Meet, traditionally held Dec. 26, has been postponed two days and will now be held next Sunday, Dec. 28. Track officials made the decision to delay the start of the meet in the face of forecasted heavy rains in the area beginning Tuesday and continuing through Friday. “With the amount of rain being forecast, it's important to make this call as early as possible to give everyone advance notice,” said Santa Anita General Manager Nate Newby. “Everyone looks forward to opening day as it's traditionally one of our biggest days of the year, so it's not a decision we make lightly. But after speaking with our stakeholders, adjusting the racing schedule at this time provides the best opportunity to have a great opening to kick off the season.” Santa Anita's revised opening week schedule has live racing Sunday and Monday, Dec. 28 and 29, returning Wednesday, Dec. 31 and continuing through Jan. 4. Entries for opening day were held as scheduled Sunday, with entries for Dec. 27, to be taken Monday, Dec. 22. This will be the first time since the 2019-2020 winter season that Santa Anita has not opened on Dec. 26. The post Weather Delay: Santa Anita’s Opening-Day Card Postponed to Sunday appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
Express Kid, who sold for $2,000 at an Arizona auction last year, is now on the Kentucky Derby (G1) trail after a dominant upset victory in the $300,000 Remington Springboard Mile Stakes at Remington Park Dec. 20.View the full article -
By Wandering Eyes · Posted
The top five betting choices were the first five home in Japan's G1 Asahi Hai Futurity Stakes on Sunday, with second choice Cavallerizzo closing to take the juvenile contest by three-quarters of a length. Diamond Knot (Bricks And Mortar), a 7-1 shot, was second, with the formerly undefeated favourite Admire Quads (Real Steel) gamely snatching third, a length behind. Sent off at 13-5, the son of Saturnalia raced content in midfield well off the fence, with the first quarter covered in :23.20. At the half-mile marker, Diamond Knot was firmly in charge, with the lathered Cavallerizzo in good order as the field rounded the bend. In need of running room at the head of the straight, a gap slammed shut on the eventual winner and Christian Demuro called an audible and steered back to the inside. Rolling under a full head of steam, Cavallerizzo exploded late to just pass a stubborn Diamond Knot four jumps from the wire. “After a normal start, I had a good position behind Yuga [Kawada],” said Cristian Demuro. “In the last corner I had a little bit of a trouble with another horse next to me but when I asked my horse to go inside, he had a good reaction, a good turn of foot. Christophe [Lemaire] was trying to escape but my horse was very strong in the end.” A five-length winner at first asking at Chukyo in August, Cavallerizzo finished just a head short of Admire Quads in the G2 Daily Hai Nisai Stakes at Kyoto over this trip on November 15. Pedigree Notes G1 Satsuki Sho (Japanese 2000 Guineas) hero Saturnalia now counts six stakes winners among his progeny, five at the group level. Cavallerizzo is his first Group 1 winner worldwide. Like G3 Fantasy Stakes heroine Festival Hill, the colt is out of a Heart's Cry mare. The first foal for his dam who won thrice from three to five, the son of Saturnalia is followed by a yearling filly by Lord Kanaloa and a weanling filly by Leontes. Balladist was covered by Justin Milano last spring. Second dam Balada Sale (Not For Sale) was a champion three-year-old filly in Argentina and won a pair of Group 1 races there. Balada Sale also left the multiple group winner and G1 Kikuka Sho (Japanese St Leger) third Satono Flag (Deep Impact). The classy G1 Polla de Potrillos hero-turned-sire Le Blues (Roman Ruler) is a half-brother to Balada Sale. Sunday, Hanshin, Japan ASAHI HAI FUTURITY STAKES-G1, ¥135,480,000, Hanshin, 12-21, 2yo, c/f, 1600mT, 1:33.20, sf. 1–CAVALLERIZZO (JPN), 123, c, 2, by Saturnalia (Jpn) 1st Dam: Balladist (Jpn), by Heart's Cry (Jpn) 2nd Dam: Balada Sale (Arg), by Not for Sale (Arg) 3rd Dam: La Balada (Arg), by Confidential Talk 1ST BLACK-TYPE WIN. 1ST GROUP WIN. 1ST GROUP 1 WIN. O-Silk Racing; B-Northern Farm (Jpn); T-Tatsuya Yoshioka; J-Cristian Demuro; ¥71,036,000. Lifetime Record: 3-2-1-0, ¥93,624,000. Werk Nick Rating: A+++. *Triple Plus*. Click for the eNicks report & 5-cross pedigree. Click for the free Equineline.com catalogue-style pedigree. 2–Diamond Knot (Jpn), 123, c, 2, Bricks And Mortar–Endless Knot (Jpn), by Deep Impact (Jpn). 1ST GROUP 1 BLACK TYPE. O-Makoto Kaneko Holdings; B-Bando Farm (Jpn); ¥28,296,000. 3–Admire Quads (Jpn), 123, c, 2, Real Steel (Jpn)–Date Line (Jpn), by Zoffany (Ire). 1ST GROUP 1 BLACK TYPE. (¥66,000,000 Wlg '23 JRHAJUL). O-Junko Kondo; B-Northern Farm (Jpn); ¥18,148,000. Margins: 3/4, 1, HF. Odds: 2.60, 7.30, 2.10. Also Ran: Ecoro Alba (Jpn), Realize Sirius (Jpn), Good Piece (GB), White Orchid (Jpn), Tagano Aralia (Jpn), Storm Thunder (Jpn), Cosomo Red (Jpn), Corteo Soleil (Jpn), Kakuuchi (Jpn), Red Ligare (Jpn), Spe Luce (Jpn). Click for the JRA chart & video. The post Cavallerizzo Closes For Asahi Hai Futurity Stakes Tally appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions. View the full article
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