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Emma Lavelle has already been to Belmont Park, but she makes her debut as a trainer when Casino Markets runs in Thursday’s Grade 1 Lonesome Glory hurdle stakes – the second of two jump races which help launch the National Steeplechase Association’s fall season.
Englishman Hadden Frost, 26, came to the United States this spring and rode several jump races. He picked up wins at My Lady’s Manor and Willowdale and nearly won the Maryland Hunt Cup. Before all of that, he won “50-odd” races on the flat and another 70 or so over jumps while following his father … Read more
Leslie and Paddy Young ran six horses on the last weekend of April. Four finished second over hurdles while the other two ran 1-2 in a training flat race.
You know him as the guy behind 2014 steeplechase champion Demonstrative and some other stars to come off Whitewood Farm in Virginia. He grew up in a family with little or no horse background, but dove in and now operates one of the country’s most successful stables. We caught up to him by telephone last … Read more
Willie McCarthy became someone else last Saturday.
“How would Paddy do this? How would Paddy do this?” McCarthy asked himself before the Iris Ann Coggins Stakes at the Fair Hill Races in Fair Hill, Md. May 27.
McCarthy didn’t stumble for an answer, hell, everybody knows how Paddy Young would have ridden For Goodness Sake.
An experienced jockey in his native Ireland, Sean McDermott is in his third full American season and got off to a big start to 2017 with two major stakes wins aboad Scorpiancer. And to think he started out riding a donkey and eventually a horse named Flamenco Fury. We talk to him about horses, Ireland, … Read more
If Mount Everest cards a steeplechase, Scorpiancer will look up and start running. He’s that game, that competitive, and proved it – again – last Saturday with a complete dismantling of five foes in the $200,000 Iroquois at Percy Warner Park in Nashville, Tenn.
He’s won six of the last seven National Steeplechase Association owners’ championships, just missed passing $1 million in seasonal earnings in 2016, campaigned the last two steeplechase champions in Dawalan and Rawnaq, and started 2016 by retiring the Virginia Gold Cup trophy with Ebanour. Irv Naylor discussed his origins in the sport and more in … Read more
This was all supposed to be newsworthy, timely and dramatic, but – as anyone in racing knows – it doesn’t always work that way. We talked to Ruby Walsh last week about Nichols Canyon and his chances at the historic TVV Capital Challenge of sweeping Cheltenham’s Stayers Hurdle and America’s Iroquois Steeplechase. Walsh was ready, … Read more
May. It’s May. It’s May? Wait, it’s May? The National Steeplechase Association’s spring schedule reached its third month and the end – didn’t we just start? – is in sight. The spring season wraps at Fair Hill May 27, a little more than four weeks from now. What’s happened so far? Plenty. TIHR covered the meets, well most of them, to this point but some news bouncing around the circuit invariably bounces past the website machine too.
