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Joe Clancy You’ll have to eat an early brunch on Wednesdays and Thursdays in Saratoga this summer if you want to catch the jump races. Post time is 12:25 p.m., with one race slated each of those days during the meet for an even dozen steeplechase tests of your handicapping skill.
OK, breathe.
As usual, I spent the first two days of the meet hassling through any number of issues including – but by no means limited to – computer networks, the Internet, advertisements, articles, photography, housing, office space, bicycles, paper racks, paper boxes, a new printer.
Trevor McCarthy is not all that far removed from playing in the A.I. du Pont High marching band, but Saturday at Delaware Park the jockey spoke with the tone of a sage after winning the Delaware Oaks aboard Fortune Pearl for trainer Graham Motion.
Less than three months ago, Larry Jones was in Delaware’s Christiana Hospital with two fractured ribs, a bruised lung, and bleeding on the brain after falling from a 2-year-old during training at Delaware Park.
The big, growthy yearling could stand up. He could walk. But it wasn’t pretty. He didn’t want to leave his stall, wouldn’t trot, couldn’t gallop.
The name of the race made me think. Some Twitter chatter made me look. Yes I was there for the career debut of Oh Say, for whom Saturday’s $50,000 Oh Say Stakes at Delaware Park is named.
The editors, writers and photographers of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred received eight honors in American Horse Publications’ Annual Awards contest for 2013, taking home four first-place awards Saturday night in Charleston, S.C.
This was going to be a better story a day after the Belmont Stakes, a day after California Chrome made history, a day after the 102,000 people cheered until they couldn’t any longer, a day after the Triple Crown ghosts finally went quietly into the night.
You can read a whole lot more in the July edition of Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, but Belmont Stakes winner Tonalist came with plenty of back story – from his time on the Virginia farm of breeders Rene and Lauren Woolcott to his private sale to owner “Shell” Evans at Saratoga in 2012.
Step One. Step Two. Step Three. Step Four. And so on. The process of converting a Thoroughbred racehorse to a Thoroughbred eventer requires many moments of learning, training, progressing.
