CYPRESS, Calif. – Pete Parrella was in his 20s when he first visited Los Alamitos Race Course in the 1960s.
“I stood on the apron,” Parrella recalled. “There were 10,000 people there. It was standing room only.”
Parrella was there to watch champion Quarter Horse Kaweah Bar and to spend time at the races with some buddies from work.
“I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. “I tried to figure out all the numbers, and I was hooked.”
Delaware Park will conduct a similar schedule of live racing this year as it did in 2013. For the second straight season, Delaware will offer 81 programs, with opening day coinciding with the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico on May 17. But by running just three days a week rather than four for the last six weeks, the season will extend an extra two weeks, ending on Oct. 22 rather than Oct. 7.
For most of the season, June 2 through Sept. 6, Delaware will race Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Mondays will be dropped starting Sept. 8. First post time remains 1:15 p.m. Eastern.
The insular world of horse racing returns to the little screen on Tuesday nights, this time in a 10-episode reality-television series revolving around the world of handicapping tournaments, rather than the typical ontrack drama of jockeys, trainers, and horses.
“Horseplayers,” which premieres Tuesday night on the Esquire Network, will follow six major players on the handicapping-tournament circuit as they try to qualify for the National Handicapping Championship, the year-end tournament that is sponsored in part by Daily Racing Form .
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Wise Dan is favored to be named Horse of the Year, and could again take home three year-end titles, when the winners of the 2013 Eclipse Awards are announced at the 43rd annual dinner Saturday night at Gulfstream Park.
Last year, Wise Dan became the first horse since John Henry in 1981 to win three Eclipse Awards in the same year. In addition to Horse of the Year, Wise Dan won both champion older male and male turf horse, divisions in which he is again a finalist this year.
Bill Bork, a longtime racing executive who ushered in the industry era of racetracks marrying with slot machines, died Jan. 13 at the age of 80 in Reading, Pa., according to family members and the Thoroughbred Racing Associations, a racetrack trade group.
Bork worked at a dozen racetracks during his long career. He was most closely associated with Penn National Race Course and later its parent company, Penn National Gaming Inc., which was one of the first racing companies to diversify into casino gambling.
Sam Houston Race Park in Houston opens a 32-date meet Friday night with its most important races on the immediate horizon, some notable new jockeys and stables, a revamped racing schedule, and a mobile wagering app that caters to patrons when they are ontrack. The season will run through March 11.
Sam Houston will fire its biggest stakes shots Jan. 25, when the $400,000 Houston Ladies Classic and the Grade 3, $200,000 Connally Turf Cup anchor a program of four stakes worth $725,000 in total. The card is Texas’s richest for Thoroughbreds.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – The imposing presence of Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Mucho Macho Man has scared away the majority of horses nominated for the $400,000 Florida Sunshine Millions Classic. But that didn’t stop Bill Terrill, a third-generation horseman and owner of Ebert Van Company, from sending one of his own trucks up to Maryland late last week to bring Gourmet Dinner to Gulfstream Park to take on Eclipse Award finalist Mucho Macho Man on Saturday.
Officials at Keeneland Race Course on Tuesday released the stakes schedule for its 2014 spring meet with minimal change from the status quo.
In all, 16 stakes worth more than $3.7 million will be run at the Lexington, Ky., track, with the Grade 1, $750,000 Blue Grass Stakes serving as the traditional highlight on April 12. All but one of the stakes are graded events.
Changes include $50,000 purse increases to the April 13 Beaumont Stakes and the April 25 Elkhorn. Both are now worth $200,000.
The Ontario Racing Commission has directed Woodbine Entertainment Group, the owner and operator of Woodbine, to direct a half-million dollars to an account it has set up for Standardbred purses at other tracks, the ORC said on Tuesday.
In a statement, the ORC said that it had issued the order to Woodbine in December of last year as part of a plan to “implement a provincial approach to purses.” The money will be used to supplement purses at The Raceway at Western Fair District, a London, Ontario, Standardbred track, the ORC said in the statement.
Monday’s nine-race card at Aqueduct will feature a two-day pick six carryover of $60,817.50. The first leg of the wager is race 4, scheduled for 1:52 p.m. Eastern.
All six races in the sequence have at least eight betting interests, before scratches.
Sunday's pick six had only one winning favorite, Ballybrit ($3.80) in race 4. The subsequent winners were Take Down Two ($53.50), Shea Darby ($11.60), Reserved Quality ($8.20), Herbal Prospector ($21.80), and Fairy Snow ($138.50).
