Catesby W. Clay

The turn of the year always prompts us to look both forward and back, along with Janus, the god of two faces for whom January is named. And that provides a perfect context for Goal Oriented (Not This Time), graduate of a farm with an unrivalled past-and one that has dynamically reimagined its future. On the one hand, the GI Malibu Stakes winner stands for continuity and heritage. Co-bred and raised by the oldest continuously operative Thoroughbred farm in the Bluegrass, he extends one of its most patiently cultivated families....

Who knows what kind of Turf, never mind what kind of world, may be inherited by such of his 15 grandchildren as may themselves be blessed to reach the landmark they celebrate with Catesby W. Clay on Tuesday? But someday they will look back on the apt emergence, in his 100th year, of a fourth Kentucky Derby winner raised on the farm founded by his own grandfather, and see that the heritage of the race itself gained at least as much from Runnymede, in 2023, as the other way round....