Hannah Ashcroft was standing by the picnic table outside of Graham Motion’s barn at Saratoga Race Course last week, rubbing conditioner into a leather halter with a sponge. From the table you could see horses galloping by on the track, and in the not-so-distant distance, the grandeur of the Saratoga grandstand presided over the entire scene.
Inti might not have become Invasor for Shadwell and Kiaran McLaughlin. But, he did become the horse who changed everything for Cyril Murphy.
Wesley Ward didn’t hesitate when asked about his horse who changed everything.
“Unfinished Symph,” Ward said, a week before his annual assault on Royal Ascot. “He was awesome.”
When my grandfather gave me his car on my 16th birthday it was a boon to my brother Bob and I. Ardent racing fans, we were now able to follow the Southern California circuit from Santa Anita Park to Hollywood Park to Del Mar without restrictions. We were students of the game and especially of trainers. The two we idolized most were Charlie Whittingham and Bobby Frankel.
Al Pike is riding high these days, not surprising considering he scored a significant pinhooking coup for one of his longtime clients at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic May 2-year-olds in training sale.
Keith Desormeaux walked out of Thursday’s Alibi Breakfast at Pimlico and – after wondering why the ever-quotable Eric Guillot didn’t attend – started talking horses. “The horse who changed my racing life is Texas Red and there’s nobody even close,” the trainer said. “That horse was a gift from God ever since the hammer dropped at the sale.”
The very first horse I syndicated in the first stable I set up to race horses owned by a group of racing partners was Political Ambition, the latest in This Is Horse Racing’s Horse Who Changed Everything feature, presented by EMBRACE THE RACE.
Say, write or even think the name Foolish Pleasure and it’s a safe bet the first thing that will pop into the mind of a racing person is the name Ruffian. The names are forever linked because of the highly publicized “Great Match” between the two star 3-year-olds of 1975 on that disastrous early July afternoon at Belmont Park.
Ask a silly question . . . You don’t need to be Carnac The Magnificent (look it up, kids) to guess Arthur Hancock’s Horse Who Changed Everything. The Kentucky horseman foaled, raised, owned and raced Hall of Famer Sunday Silence, whose 14-start racing career included nine wins and five seconds (with four of those runner-up efforts coming by less than a length). Sunday Silence changed the lives of plenty of people – some who knew him and some who only saw him.
Trainer Chuck Lawrence went to the Breeders’ Cup with a horse last year. He’s won 359 races as a trainer. He rode 1994 steeplechase champion Warm Spell, and won two National Steeplechase Association jockey championships as part of a 122-win career. But his Horse Who Changed Everything wasn’t even a horse.
