Brad Cox, a leading contender for the Eclipse Award for outstanding trainer, broke the single-season earnings mark set by Chad Brown in 2019 on Friday when 2-year-old In Dreams won a $100,000 allowance race at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. With the win, worth $60,000, Cox has total earnings of $31,135,781 with two weeks of racing left in the year.
Disgraced Thoroughbred trainer Jorge Navarro, who went from claiming trainer to conditioner of multiple graded stakes winners who sometimes gave hard-to-believe performances, was sentenced Friday to five years in prison after pleading guilty to one felony charge of conspiracy to commit drug adulteration or misbranding.
The Illinois Racing Board on Thursday narrowly voted to reject plans by Churchill Downs Inc. to continue operating off-track betting parlors in the state despite the cessation of racing at the company’s Arlington Park in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.
Louis Cella, the president of Oaklawn Park, has been appointed to serve on the Management Committee of Equibase, the data company owned in partnership by a racetrack trade group and The Jockey Club.
The California Horse Racing Board approved a six-month racing license for Golden Gate Fields starting later this month after a lengthy discussion at its monthly meeting on Wednesday concerning recent equine fatalities in racing and training at the Northern California track.
Jay Privman, the national correspondent for Daily Racing Form since 1998, has been selected for induction into the National Museum of Racing’s Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor, along with the late writers Walter Haight and Jack Mann, the museum announced on Tuesday.
The 2021 handle on live Thoroughbred racing at Woodbine produced an all-sources handle of $505,348,339, the third-highest season total in Woodbine’s history.
Racetracks survived, and, in some cases, thrived, during the height of the pandemic last year by capitalizing on television and account wagering and modifying racing schedules to better position themselves in the simulcast marketplace, track executives said on a Wednesday afternoon panel at the Global Symposium on Racing.
Racing industry conferences have been dominated over the past five years with discussions of fixed-odds betting and sports wagering, and the Global Symposium on Racing was no different. Much of the discussion has centered on the opportunities available to racing in partnering with sports-book operations and abandoning, at least in part, the 100-year-old practice in the U.S. of restricting betting on racing to pari-mutuel wagering, along with the drawbacks and potential pitfalls to those decisions.
A panel of top racing officials discussing field size on Wednesday morning at the Global Symposium on Racing in Tucson, Ariz., were uniformly critical of a practice that has become common in racing offices across the country over the past decade – giving horsemen a smorgasbord of choices for overnight races.
