Features

The mood at Suffolk Downs on October 4, 2014 was grim and the weather gods seemed to be sharing the despair that permeated throughout the local racing community. The raw, rainy, quintessentially miserable New England fall day was a fitting backdrop to what, at the time, looked like the swan song for horse racing at the East Boston oval.

Dust off those rusty strings just one more time…

“Gonna make ‘em shine,” Arch Kingsley, Jr. said in a text, referencing a Grateful Dead ballad, before mounting his first ride in eight years. 

Forty-one seconds. No horse will ever work a half-mile that fast on Saratoga Race Course’s Oklahoma training track – not on purpose anyway – but it was the bullet figure (:41.09 to be precise, sort of) for depositing 25 tons of dirt in less than a sixteenth of a mile Tuesday morning as a complete overhaul of the historic 1-mile oval nears completion.

Two black-and-white photos, grainy but matted and framed, sit on the table in front of Dr. John R.S. Fisher. He’s in the 50-year-old images, the jockey aboard Landing Party at the 17th fence of the 1971 Maryland Hunt Cup, and tries to conjure the feeling of flight.

“That’s the greatest fence I ever jumped,” he says, slowly, as if he’s feeling it again. Must be some feeling.

As horses ship in for the Arkansas Derby and other horses ship out for the year, I find myself reminiscing on the 2021 meet at Oaklawn Park.

Jack Fisher is a master of the quick draw. As he paces down the aisle of the bank barn at his Butler, Md., farm, he reaches toward his right hip. He grasps, wields and answers before his cell phone rings a second time.

As Keeneland is about to start another spring meeting with more fans returning, I want to share my good fortune in working as a “Green Coat” during the 2020 Keeneland fall meet and the 2020 Breeders’ Cup World Championships during the height of COVID-19.

One-hundred sixty-five pounds. Not a goal. An ultimatum.

And not easy for a guy who’s 6-foot-3.

Yelling and profanity rang out from the front stretch of Oaklawn Park one morning last month. The shouts weren’t over a loose horse running around the track, rather something more terrifying.

I changed the name of this feature, from a road to Cheltenham to a postcard from Cheltenham as I post some of my favorite photos from previous years.