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Joe Clancy 
In what feels like 2014 all over again, California Chrome returned to action with a facile score in Saturday’s Grade 2 San Pasqual at Santa Anita. The chestnut 5-year-old sat close to the lead, overwhelmed everyone on the turn and rolled home to win by 1 1/4 lengths while geared down late. Sound familiar? He did that routinely two years ago – all the way to the Horse of the Year crown.
Racing fan, occasional poet, Saratoga Springs resident, long-time Saratoga Special supporter and friend of Santa Claus, Bob Giordano penned this twist on the famous “A Visit from St. Nicholas” story by Clement Clarke Moore. Enjoy.
Reprinted from the July 2014 edition of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred magazine.
Art Sherman walked up the slope from the Pimlico Race Course stable area to the track and thought about six decades in racing, the van rides, the nights sleeping in the straw, the wins, the losses, the work, the worry. Somehow alone amidst the NBC cameras and assorted hoopla of Baltimore’s rite of spring, he thought about his father’s barbershop, his family, Mesh Tenney, Swaps, riding races in the cold at Bowie. Then he spoke his mind.
Dawalan will be the name everyone remembers from Saturday’s Colonial Cup, but the whole day looked like one of the season’s best on paper and lived up to it on the course. Sixty-six horses started in the seven races at Springdale Race Course, with plenty of signature performances beyond the Grade 1 feature.
The Colonial Cup. It always conjures 1970, when the race was the first $100,000 steeplechase in North America, when men wore overcoats to the races and women put on rain hats, when Marion du Pont Scott played host to the everyone, when the race was a big idea nobody really knew would even make it 1970.
Trainer Kate Dalton’s 2015 already includes a career-high five wins, a likely novice hurdle championship and a medication violation she succeeded in appealing. A big finish would pretty much fit right into the script, and she goes for it with Diplomat in Saturday’s Grade 1 Colonial Cup at Springdale Race Course in Camden, S.C.
Like a guy down at the mill or a master mechanic at the local garage, Gustavian shows up every day and does his job. It’s been four years and 15 races, and the 9-year-old gelding has once – once – not finished among the top three over jumps.
Quietly, always quietly, Cyril Murphy trains some of the best steeplechase horses in the country at owner Irv Naylor’s farm near Butler, Md. A former jockey, whose American career included several seasons riding for Tom Voss, Murphy aims Dawalan, Rawnaq and Able Deputy at Saturday’s Grade 1 Colonial Cup in Camden, S.C.
At the Montpelier and Callaway Gardens steeplechase meets Nov. 7 and 8, jockey Darren Nagle won six races. But he singled out one. “The one that didn’t count was probably the most important one,” he said with a laugh after riding out for trainer Graham Motion Friday.
The Iroquois Steeplechase, the richest spring meeting on the American jump-racing calendar, teams up with England’s Cheltenham Racecourse, home of the world famous Cheltenham Festival, on a $500,000 bonus next year.
