Features

Funny Cide doesn’t walk the shedrow or even reluctantly hang out in the pony stall anymore. Jersey Town is a stallion. Sky Blazer was retired and his stall is empty. Confrontation got sold to Dubai.

Asked to do a Stable Tour, Rick Schosberg, didn’t hesitate, turning at his tack room door and walking, “Let’s do that.”

Schosberg started at the first stall and walked the length of the shedrow, talking about his Saratoga string and a few horses at Belmont Park.

John Kimmel watched a few breezers on the Oklahoma Training Track’s turf course Friday morning, hopped in his golf cart, drove back across Union Avenue to his four small and secluded barns in the northeast corner of the stable area along Union Avenue, talked about a couple horses with longtime assistant Loretta Lusteg and some of his grooms and took a deep breath.

Carlos Martin was on one end of the shank, a good looking dark bay gelding on the other on a quiet Monday morning in the barn area next to the far turn on the Saratoga Race Course main track.

Jena Antonucci isn’t afraid to take on what she calls “project horses.” She readily admits that many of the 30-plus horses split between Barn 73 at the Oklahoma Training Track and at Florida’s Gulfstream Park.

Trainer David Donk would never call himself a technology guy and reluctantly accepted an iPad as a gift from his wife Faye a few years ago. He owned a laptop and an iPhone, what did he need with another gadget?

Now, it’s a big part of his job and a fairly constant way to access the facts about his growing stable of horses.

Phil Serpe’s 18 horses at Saratoga are sound and ready to run. Him? Not so much. And he’s got the boot on his right leg to show for it.

The short answer is he strained his achilles tendon sheath, which sounds like something a horse would do, while working out this winter in Florida. The long answer involves tripping over a crossbar in the door of his barn at Belmont Park, falling to the asphalt and fracturing both elbows.

Jimmy Toner added his name to the list of winners through the first 10 days of the meeting when Thieves Guild posted a mild upset in Sunday’s Caress Stakes. He won again Saturday as Recepta took the De La Rose Stakes on the Whitney undercard.

Jimmy Jerkens walks down his low-roofed shedrow on the Oklahoma side and gives a history lesson on his barn.

“My father was in this barn in 1955,” Jerkens said. “He would always pull up and say, ‘Yeah, Admiral Vee was in this stall, I had these stalls…’ Laz Barrera was in this barn when he had Affirmed.”