Ring Weekend, the Tampa Bay Derby winner, was confirmed as a starter for the $1.5 million Preakness Stakes at Pimlico after trainer Graham Motion was pleased with the way the horse worked Saturday morning at Fair Hill.
Motion said Ring Weekend worked six furlongs in 1:13.20, edging away from a workmate late over the dirt surface at Fair Hill. Exercise rider Alice Clapham was up for the move.
ELMONT, N.Y. - The unconquerable, invincible, unbeatable Tom Durkin is calling it a career.
Durkin, the voice of the New York Racing Association since 1990 and a racetrack announcer for 43 years, announced Saturday that he will retire on Aug. 31 -- the penultimate day of the 2014 Saratoga meeting.
“I think I’m just retiring for the same reasons anybody else does,” Durkin, 63, told Daily Racing Form, “You maybe want to try to do a little something else, the job is getting a little more difficult and I don’t want people to say, ‘Durkin’s still there?’ ”
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Neither rain nor mud nor a slightly altered schedule could keep Kentucky Derby winner California Chrome from his appointed rounds early Saturday at Churchill Downs.
Heavy overnight rain that lasted into the morning hours led assistant trainer Alan Sherman to send California Chrome out for a routine gallop shortly before 6:30 a.m. Eastern, about a half-hour earlier than usual. Under regular exercise rider Willie Delgado, the colt had no mishaps when spending about 15 minutes on a sloppy, sealed racetrack.
ELMONT, N.Y. - The organization representing New York horsemen will recommend to the state Gaming Commission to adopt a rule that will advise the recommended withdrawal time for flunixin, a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory commonly referred to as Banamine, be 32 hours from a race rather than the current 24.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – General a Rod, a troubled 11th in the May 3 Kentucky Derby following a slow start, will return in the May 17 Preakness Stakes at Pimlico, trainer Mike Maker said Friday.
“My initial thoughts were not to come back in two weeks,” Maker said. “But after a couple days back, he was full of energy and ate up well following the Derby.”
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – It was business as usual Friday morning for Kentucky Derby winner California Chrome, who turned in another routine gallop at Churchill Downs as his prepares for the second leg of the Triple Crown, the May 17 Preakness at Pimlico in Baltimore.
As is his custom, he went slowly under exercise rider Willie Delgado in his first lap around the Churchill Downs oval before picking up his pace over a gallop of approximately 1 3/4 miles
Daily Racing Form ’s publisher emeritus, Steven Crist, worked for years as a turf writer at The New York Times, and the fact that Crist handicapped and bet added welcome doses of data and analysis to typical newspaper story lines. Here’s a paragraph from a Kentucky Derby recap:
ELMONT, N.Y. – As well-attired guests began to arrive for the official grand opening of a new equine clinic across the street from Belmont Park, a horse who had undergone surgery for a condylar fracture at the facility hours earlier was being led back to her stall at the track.
My Little Lulu is one of more than 50 patients whom Cornell Ruffian Equine Specialists has had since it opened last month on the site of the former Ruffian Equine Medical Center on Plainfield Avenue three years after it closed.
Art Grace, a longtime sports reporter for the Miami News who covered the south Florida racing beat, died on April 17, according to an obituary published in the Miami Herald. Grace was 88.
Grace worked for the Miami News from the early 1950s until the paper was shuttered in 1988, covering boxing and horse racing for nearly the entire tenure. He was also briefly a television critic for the paper. After the Miami News closed, he occasionally wrote feature stories on racing for the Daily Racing Form and Associated Press.
