Last to Fire, the 2013 World Champion Running Quarter Horse, was transferred from trainer Sergio Fiscal to Paul Jones on Thursday, Jones said on Saturday.
The move was made four days after Last to Fire finished eighth in the Grade 1 Vessels Maturity at Los Alamitos last Sunday, a race the 5-year-old gelding won in 2013.
Veteran jockey Tony Black was injured in a Saturday morning spill at Parx Racing and is scheduled to have surgery for a broken right arm Monday, he said Saturday evening.
Black, 62, was thrown from his mount at a time a horse was loose on the track. He was taken to St. Mary's Hospital.
"I was working a horse this morning and there was a loose horse on the track," Black said. "The alert signals went off and I went to raise up and the right webbing on my saddle broke and I fell."
ELMONT, N.Y. – Uncle Sigh, the runner-up in pair of graded stakes for 3-year-olds in the winter, likely will miss the remainder of the year after being diagnosed with a pulled muscle in his back, trainer Gary Contessa said Saturday morning.
Contessa said Uncle Sigh would be turned out at owner Chip McEwen’s farm in Ocala, Fla., for 60 days and hopefully come back to him at Belmont Park in the fall.
With Princess of Sylmar making only her third start of the year, and second in a graded stakes, on Saturday in the Delaware Handicap, it is a safe assumption that we will be seeing more of her the second half of the year, at least in prime-time races.
The most refreshing news regarding Princess of Sylmar is that both owner Ed Stanco and trainer Todd Pletcher are open to the possibility of sending her back to California for another try at the Breeders’ Cup Distaff. Last year’s Distaff did not go well for Princess of Sylmar and remains the worst race on her sterling record.
Following his death Feb. 13, 1913, Stephen Sanford was called by The Thoroughbred Record “one of the main pillars of New York racing and particular patron to Saratoga.”
Less than two months later, the Saratoga Racing Association voted to change the name of its Hurricana Stakes (run for the first and only time in 1910) to the Sanford Memorial Stakes, to be run Aug. 23 that year, following the shuttering of all racing in the Empire State the previous two seasons.
Delaware Handicap Day will be especially festive this year.
Always the high point of the Delaware Park meet, the race has held its purse at $750,000 the last five seasons and has continued to draw cream-of-the-crop fillies and mares – Royal Delta won the last two runnings, and Blind Luck nosed out the eventual Horse of the Year, Havre de Grace, in 2011. A large crowd can be expected Saturday, and the party-atmosphere “grove” will be hopping.
Delaware Park and the Delaware Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association have signed a dates extension that will ensure 81 days of racing for the 2016 season. The two parties already had an agreement in place guaranteeing that number of dates for next year.
“The stability and certainty this extension provides will help us attract additional horsemen to Delaware and will make a racing circuit in the mid-Atlantic more viable,” said John Mooney, the track’s executive director of racing.
Princess of Sylmar will be the star of the show Saturday at Delaware Park, where she rules as a prohibitive favorite over five rivals in the 77th running of the Delaware Handicap.
The Grade 1, $750,000 Delaware Handicap will be run at 1 1/4 miles, a distance that should suit the long-winded Princess of Sylmar perfectly. In her only other start at the distance, Princess of Sylmar won the Grade 1 Alabama Stakes at Saratoga last August.
Fred Grossman, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Racing Form from the 70s into the 90s, died on Sunday, according to family members. Grossman was 86 and lived in Monroe Township, N.J.
Grossman was named editor of the Morning Telegraph, a sister publication which later merged with the Form, in 1975 after more than two decades on the newspaper’s copy desk and as an assistant editor. He served as the editor until his retirement in the early 1990s.
Graham Motion put on quite a show over the weekend, winning the Grade 2 Delaware Oaks on Saturday and the Grade 1 United Nations at Monmouth Park on Sunday.
While Fortune Pearl’s victory in the $300,000 Oaks was not surprising, Main Sequence’s U.N. triumph was amazing on some levels. The 5-year-old hadn’t won since May 2012, hadn’t run since last October, and was making his United States debut.
“The Niarchos family felt he needed a change of scenery and they sent him to me last winter,” Motion said after the U.N. “Unfortunately, he had a long trip and got sick.
