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Richard Boucher and Willstown stared a Saratoga Grade 1 stakes score smack in the face. At 46-1.
“We came down to the last fence and I had her beat, I had her beat,” Boucher said. “And then Blythe Miller and that horse went on and beat me. I’m like, ‘You’re kidding me, you’re absolutely kidding me.’ I had a third once, but that second in the Turf Writers is the closest I ever came and that was pretty close.”
Until Thursday.
Tom McGreevy buys yearlings. It’s what he does. Sometimes, they turn out to be Songbird. Other times, they turn out to be Barefoot Mailman and if you’ve never heard of Barefoot Mailman that’s because he won one race and is now a show horse.
Katherine “Kat” Zwiesler was 12 years old, aboard a horse named Gambling Man at Sharp Farm in Delaware and really wanted to be somewhere – anywhere – else.
Got a half-hour? Park your car, decline a golf-cart ride, walk a bit, then find a fence to lean on beside a maple tree. It’s 6:09 in the morning and a cool breeze puffs under that maple tree next to that fence.
On the horsepath, road and racetrack shaded by that tree a morning unfolds.
“Morning sir.” “How you doing?” “Tired already.”
Here we are again. Fifteen years ago, we packed up much of what we owned and drove north to Saratoga to start a daily newspaper.
It was chaos.
What are you doing Thursday night? If you live anywhere near Wilmington, Del., get to Theatre N and see “Being AP.” The documentary chronicles the last season of jump jockey Tony McCoy’s career.
McCoy, if you don’t know, was the dominant jockey in English/Irish National Hunt Racing and arguably the most dominant athlete of his time no matter the sport.
If you’re alive in 2016, you probably know someone. If you’re in Thoroughbred racing in 2016, you know someone. Or at least that’s the way it seems when it comes to alcoholism and its connection to racing, and everyday life.
I know a whole lot of people who are recovering alcoholics. Many are in racing. Some are quite close to me. I admire their courage, their ability to set aside that part of their lives, their skill at living one day at a time in sobriety and sanity. They didn’t destroy their lives, though some tell me they almost did, and they pretty much all left at least some destruction behind them.
I write horses’ stories, watch them race, see them train, maybe get to say hello in the barn or feed them a mint. Some, I’ve forgotten about. Others, I can’t help but remember.
And I remember Change Of Command.
Twelve questions from the Iroquois…
Nyquist has been to 33 of the last 36 Preaknesses. He’ll make it 34 of 37 Saturday. He’s even been to several runnings of the Belmont Stakes to try (and usually fail) to see history – Big Brown let him down; American Pharoah came through. Nyquist went to a few Breeders’ Cups at Santa Anita and was at Keeneland for Thoroughbred racing’s championship day last year.
