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Joe Clancy 
Willie McCarthy became someone else last Saturday.
“How would Paddy do this? How would Paddy do this?” McCarthy asked himself before the Iris Ann Coggins Stakes at the Fair Hill Races in Fair Hill, Md. May 27.
McCarthy didn’t stumble for an answer, hell, everybody knows how Paddy Young would have ridden For Goodness Sake.
An experienced jockey in his native Ireland, Sean McDermott is in his third full American season and got off to a big start to 2017 with two major stakes wins aboad Scorpiancer. And to think he started out riding a donkey and eventually a horse named Flamenco Fury. We talk to him about horses, Ireland, … Read more
If Mount Everest cards a steeplechase, Scorpiancer will look up and start running. He’s that game, that competitive, and proved it – again – last Saturday with a complete dismantling of five foes in the $200,000 Iroquois at Percy Warner Park in Nashville, Tenn.
He’s won six of the last seven National Steeplechase Association owners’ championships, just missed passing $1 million in seasonal earnings in 2016, campaigned the last two steeplechase champions in Dawalan and Rawnaq, and started 2016 by retiring the Virginia Gold Cup trophy with Ebanour. Irv Naylor discussed his origins in the sport and more in … Read more
Michael Gerard Walsh III passed away May 12 at First Health Hospice House, in Pinehurst, N.C. surrounded by his wife, family and friends.
This was all supposed to be newsworthy, timely and dramatic, but – as anyone in racing knows – it doesn’t always work that way. We talked to Ruby Walsh last week about Nichols Canyon and his chances at the historic TVV Capital Challenge of sweeping Cheltenham’s Stayers Hurdle and America’s Iroquois Steeplechase. Walsh was ready, … Read more
After riding seven races at Aqueduct, with a win and a third, Feb. 4 Rajiv Maragh got home in time to watch Gulfstream Park’s Holy Bull Stakes with his father. And saw a revelation.
“Graham Motion has the best 3-year-old in the country,” Maragh told his dad after watching Irish War Cry dismantle six others in the Grade 2 stakes. “He’s got the Kentucky Derby favorite.”
When Irish War Cry made off with the Wood Memorial in April, Ellie Glaccum thought of her great aunt Isabelle de Tomaso and smiled. De Tomaso, 86, had just landed her biggest prize as an owner/breeder while also earning a spot in the Kentucky Derby four weeks in the future.
May. It’s May. It’s May? Wait, it’s May? The National Steeplechase Association’s spring schedule reached its third month and the end – didn’t we just start? – is in sight. The spring season wraps at Fair Hill May 27, a little more than four weeks from now. What’s happened so far? Plenty. TIHR covered the meets, well most of them, to this point but some news bouncing around the circuit invariably bounces past the website machine too.
Four, five, six times on the walk to the paddock for the Maryland Hunt Cup Saturday, race favorite Senior Senator ran into the back of stablemate Derwins Prospector. The latter, a longshot with nothing but defeats in nine starts over timber, put up with the punishment like a tolerant older dog adapting to life with a new puppy in the house.
Except once.
