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Joe Clancy 
George Weaver won 11 races at Saratoga in 2014 and 12 last year. In the midst of another strong upstate season, he’ll need four over the meet’s final nine racing days to keep the improvement going. (Editor’s note: Originally published in Aug. 27 issue of The Saratoga Special.)
Four weeks into the meet, trainer Carlos Martin looks at his string of 15 in Barn 31 just beyond the far turn of the main track, with a dozen more horses at Belmont Park, and smiles. Five wins, from 16 starts through Saturday? He’ll take it. He’ll also look at a slight change in his schedule and file that away for next year and beyond. (Editor’s note: Originally published in Aug. 21 issue of The Sarartoga Special.)
Fifty-five horses occupy stalls in David Cannizzo’s barns at Saratoga and Belmont Park and he could probably talk about all of them, but . . . let’s stick to a reasonable sampling. (Editor’s note: Originally published in Aug. 9 issue of The Saratoga Special.)
Thirty feet in the air on a lift fixing a gutter on the barn, Jack Fisher heard Connor Hankin call out, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”
The trainer looked down and said, “Why, what’s going on?” It could have been anything, really. A loose shoe on a horse, some broken tack, a stuck tractor, Roscoe the donkey was lost, maybe Hankin had an exam to study for and would have to miss the next week’s jump races. But Fisher had a gutter to fix.
“You might want to come down from the lift for this,” Hankin said.
Graham Motion came out firing early at Saratoga, with four wins from his first 13 starts at the meet. Home base is Maryland’s Fair Hill Training Center, but he’s got 20 stalls on the Saratoga backside near the main track’s three-eighths pole. (Editor’s note: Originally published in Aug. 7 issue of The Saratoga Special.)
Somebody stole Al Stall’s training board – right out of the tack room. That’s why his 18-horse Saratoga roster is scribbled in black pen on a small, paper trainer’s chart. The handwriting won’t win many prizes, but the horses are there and they’ll likely win a few races before Stall returns to his Kentucky base for the fall season. (Editor’s note: Originally published in July 31 issue of The Saratoga Special.)
Trainer Mark Casse hesitated and then said it. “I think we’ve got about eight millionaires in the barn. Wow. That’s something when you think about it.” Then he started counting. “Kaigun, Dynamic Sky, Lexie Lou, Za Approval – they’re in Canada. And here we’ve got Tepin, Catch A Glimpse and . . . well, maybe there’s only six. I think there’s one more though. That’s going to bother me.” (Editor’s note: Originallay published in July 23 issue of The Saratoga Special.)
Hill Parker ran into some traffic around Rochester, worried about how hot his filly was getting and contemplated the electrical options available for putting a box fan in a horse trailer.
Behind the wheel, navigating a 13 1/2-hour drive in 90-degree heat on a Friday, he also smiled proudly. Thursday, the Lexington, Ky. resident won a Saratoga hurdle stakes with Get Ready Set Goes – a 4-year-old filly bred by his mother Frances Hill “Snowie” Myers, who died in September 2014. A lifelong horsewoman, Myers was 74 and imparted plenty of horsemanship to her son.
Richard Boucher and Willstown stared a Saratoga Grade 1 stakes score smack in the face. At 46-1.
“We came down to the last fence and I had her beat, I had her beat,” Boucher said. “And then Blythe Miller and that horse went on and beat me. I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me, you’re absolutely kidding me.’ I had a third once, but that second in the Turf Writers is the closest I ever came and that was pretty close.”
Until Thursday.
Lucien Laurin looked at his groom and asked, “You’re with this horse every day, what do you think?” The groom, just recently promoted from hotwalker, replied, “Boss, I’m green, but if any horse can make it this horse can make it.”
