Week in Review

When Fierceness (City of Light) put on a show in the GI Florida Derby there didn't seem to be any question over who the favorite would be in the GI Kentucky Derby. The Mike Repole-homebred put on quite a show that day, winning by a record 13 1/2 lengths while earning a 110 Beyer figure, the fastest dirt number recorded by any horse this year. He gave the impression that if he could duplicate that race in the Kentucky Derby, there wouldn't be a horse on the planet that could...

You need to channel your inner Meat Loaf to put Saturday's trio of points-awarding stakes for the GI Kentucky Derby in perspective. The well-backed winners of the GI Arkansas Derby, GI Florida Derby, and G2 UAE Derby all delivered commanding, speed-centric performances that transformed what has been an underwhelming prep season into a Triple Crown chase suddenly spiked with intrigue. 'TDN Rising Star' Muth (Good Magic) swatted back a surprise mid-race attack to win authoritatively at Oaklawn. Fellow 'Rising Star' and juvenile champ Fierceness (City of Light) administered a 13...

Undefeated 'TDN Rising Star' Nysos (Nyquist) uncorked the type of "Wow!" performance in the GIII Robert Lewis S. on Saturday that rightfully should be the big story out of a weekend that featured four prep stakes for the GI Kentucky Derby. This 3-for-3 son of 2016 Derby winner Nyquist from trainer Bob Baffert's barn has now won at six, seven and eight furlongs by a combined 26 3/4 lengths while earning upward-trending Beyer Speed Figures of 96 and 97 (at age two), plus a sizzling 105 for his sophomore debut....

Last week's announcement that the 2024 GI Belmont S. will be migrating north to Saratoga Race Course for 2024 because of the $455-million extensive renovation of Belmont Park made official a move that the New York Racing Association (NYRA) has been openly discussing for months. But since the press release from the New York governor's office came out during a slow time of the year for racing news, it rekindled speculation about the ramifications of tinkering with the historical significance of the third jewel of the Triple Crown. The debate...

After the venerable and influential news show 60 Minutes aired a piece on horse racing last week, people within the industry were understandably upset. The story was ugly, filled with graphic and grisly coverage of horses breaking down, and portrayed racing as a sport where drugs, corruption and horse fatalities had reached the point of being out of control. "Horse racing is an industry where extremely devoted people labor because of one common thing: we all love horses, especially thoroughbred horses," Denali Stud's Craig Bandoroff wrote to 60 Minutes. "That...

Trainer Bob Baffert went 0-for-9 in Breeders' Cup races, and four months ago he received his dis-invitation to the 150th GI Kentucky Derby in the form of an extension of his original two-year suspension from properties owned by the gaming company Churchill Downs, Inc. (CDI). But neither the Breeders' Cup blanking nor the Derby banishment should be taken as indications that the Hall-of-Fame conditioner is running low on horsepower, particularly in the 2-year-old division. A pair of Baffert juveniles on the first two days of the Del Mar meeting this...

The next best thing to the Breeders' Cup is a weekend filled with Breeders' Cup preps. That was the story last week as 31 graded stakes races were contested, many of them races that would help shape the fields for the Breeders' Cup races. Who were the big winners? Who were the big losers? Here's our reports card: Up to the Mark: A+ It had been a depressing year for North American-based turf horses, who lost race after race to European shippers, including some whose credentials were rather modest. Saturday's...

Going into Saturday's wiring of the GI Awesome Again S., Slow Down Andy (Nyquist) hadn't won a dirt race in 1 1/2 years, and he still has the same habit of swishing his tail in the stretch when lifelong riding partner Mario Gutierrez implores him for run. But this Reddam Racing homebred trained by Doug O'Neill had been finishing respectably behind some A-list names in his company lines, so bettors made him favored for the first time in 15 months, and at 2-1 odds Slow Down Andy rewarded that confidence...

The juvenile fillies division is crystalizing into one of the most intriguing subplots of the Breeders' Cup as we approach the six-week mark to the championships. The skyrocketing 'TDN Rising Star' Tamara (Bolt d'Oro), unveiled barely a month ago, has emerged from the West Coast as the obvious topper of her division. But the brilliant, 2-for-2  daughter of four-time champion Beholder is likely to have a fight on her hands as the upcoming stakes engagements extend around two turns, thanks to a talented trio of fillies who have ascended in...

It's often been said that, no matter how hard the sport works to become safer, there will never come a time when there are zero fatalities. Unfortunately, that's probably true. But at the recently concluded Del Mar meet, not a single horse suffered a fatal breakdown during a race. Not once did a horse break a leg, crumple to the ground and then have to be euthanized behind a curtain blocking the view of a horrified public, the story making its way into the newspapers or the local news and...

At the conclusion of racing on Monday, Saratoga will have handled about $800 million for the meet, the third highest handle figure ever for the track. On-track attendance once again topped one million, and was officially at 1,055,543 after Saturday's GI Jockey Club Gold Cup Day card with two racing days to go. Yet, by just about any measure, it was not a good meet. Saratoga came into 2023 with the wind at its back. Every year the racing seemed to get bigger, the handle would grow and more and...

After 3 1/2 decades in the saddle, Cindy Murphy knows all too well how fate lurks with every hoofbeat when you're a jockey. Occasionally though, chance and risk manifest themselves in the form of good karma on the racetrack. On Saturday night at Prairie Meadows, the rewarding circumstances of the 61-year-old jockey's 2,000th career win seemed almost too scripted to be true. Murphy's landmark victory aboard Crypto Mo (Mohaymen) in the July 8 GIII Iowa Oaks was her first lifetime graded stakes win after 18,131 lifetime mounts. It was also...