Longtime Thoroughbred trainer Sandy Shulman died on Sunday at 78, his family said. Shulman was a racehorse owner and the operator of a photography business in Southern California in the early 1980s when he decided on a career change. He wanted to spend more time around horses.

Shulman became a Thoroughbred trainer and within a year had his first winner. Over the next three decades, he won two training titles at Hollywood Park and saddled graded stakes winners throughout California until his retirement in 2010.

Actor Dick Van Patten, well known for his role on the television series “Eight is Enough” in the late 1970s and early 1980s and a fixture in the clubhouses of Southern California racetracks, died on Tuesday after an illness.

Van Patten died in Santa Monica, Calif., at the age of 86 from complications of diabetes.

The Supreme Court of Ohio heard arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by an anti-gambling group contending that Gov. John Kasich overstepped his authority when authorizing slot machines at state racetracks in 2011.

The lawsuit was brought by the Ohio Roundtable, a conservative group that has argued that voter approval was necessary to authorize the slot machines. All of Ohio’s tracks have since built slot-machine parlors since the 2011 authorization, including several tracks that were built from the ground up using relocated racing licenses.

California Chrome continues to show improvement from a foot injury that prevented him from starting in the Group 1 Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot in England on June 17, trainer Art Sherman said on Wednesday.

California Chrome has been jogged on recent mornings at trainer Rae Guest’s stable in Newmarket, England, where the 2014 Horse of the Year has been based since early April. Sherman said California Chrome’s right front foot was thought to have an abscess, but it is now believed that the colt is suffering from a severe bruise.

A U.S. federal court of appeals has upheld a lower court’s decision that New York regulators did not violate the due-process rights of trainer Richard Dutrow when they banned him for 10 years in 2011, according to court records.

CHICAGO – The Illinois Racing Board handed Arlington a defeat and a victory during a long and contentious regular monthly meeting Tuesday, voting down the track’s request to be permitted to card fewer than eight races per day but granting permission to alter longstanding rules governing how race cards are assembled.

A Quarter Horse co-owned by R.D. Hubbard, the racetrack executive who has been outspoken about medication violations in racing, has tested positive for an excess level of the regulated bronchodilator clenbuterol, according to New Mexico commission officials.

ARCADIA, Calif. – Motown Men has spent the last three months defying logic and expectations for Gulliver Racing and trainer Ted H. West.

Claimed for $40,000 at Santa Anita in March, Motown Men won an optional claimer in April, finished third in the Grade 3 Precisionist Stakes on May 2, and won the $151,250 Tiznow Stakes for California-breds at a mile on May 23.

Approximately 10 percent of the picnic tables in the backyard of Saratoga Race Course will be reserved for paying customers during the meet that starts July 24 and runs through Sept. 7, the New York Racing Association announced on Monday.

NYRA officials said 100 tables would be available to be reserved each day of the meet at a cost of $40 on weekdays, $60 on weekends, and $100 on Travers Stakes Day, Aug. 29. Another 850 tables will remain available on a first-come, first-served basis, the association said.

Daily Racing Form’s Matt Hegarty won the top prize for news reporting in a single article at the American Horse Publications annual awards banquet Saturday in San Antonio, Texas.

Hegarty was honored for his piece “Indiana Vet Case Draws Scrutiny, Debate,” published Nov. 11, 2014, which chronicled the suspension of veterinarian Ross Russell at Indiana Grand following a report from a backstretch security employee who said she saw Russell in the stall of a horse who was scheduled to race that day.