While Belmont Stakes winner Union Rags won’t race again this year due to an injured suspensory ligament, the prognosis for a return to the races in 2013 is favorable should his connections choose to bring him back.
“The prognosis for a full return to racing is excellent,” Kathleen Anderson, the Maryland-based veterinarian who examined Union Rags, said in a press release issued Wednesday.
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Belmont Stakes winner Union Rags has sustained a minor tendon injury in his left front leg and will miss the remainder of the 2012 racing season, according to Russell Jones, a close longtime advisor to the colt's owner and breeder, Phyllis Wyeth.
Jones, who was attending the Fasig-Tipton July yearling sale here on Tuesday, said he heard about the injury from Union Rags' trainer, Michael Matz.
Mike Mackey, a longtime racing official and track manager whose career took him from his native Michigan to as far south as Florida and as far west as Vancouver, Canada, died at his home in Canton, Mich., on Tuesday morning of complications of throat cancer, according to his family and a friend. Mackey was 72.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Trainer Doug O’Neill intends to drop an appeal of a 45-day penalty for a total carbon dioxide overage from the 2010 Del Mar meeting, he said on Monday.
O’Neill has held recent discussions with the California Horse Racing Board regarding the dates of the suspension, which O’Neill said are likely to be mid-August to the end of September, covering the last weeks of the Del Mar meeting and the entire Los Angeles County Fair meeting at Fairplex Park.
The dates of the suspension are expected to be announced by the racing board in the near future.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Turallure, the beaten favorite in three major turf races this year, will be getting at least 60 days off after apparent bone bruising was diagnosed and will miss the upcoming Saratoga meet, if not the rest of the year, trainer Charlie Lopresti said early Friday from his Keeneland base.
Belmont Stakes winner Union Rags worked five furlongs in 1:00.60 Friday morning at the Fair Hill training center in Maryland and barring an unforeseen change of heart, he will make his next start in the $1 million Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park on July 29, trainer Michael Matz said.
Mark McGuire doesn’t need any added incentive to play the ponies.
The 52-year-old owner of the Magoo’s sports bar and grill in Newbury Park, Calif., went to Los Alamitos with his parents when he was 12, hit a 60-1 longshot, and has been in love with the sport ever since.
Rene Douglas had won six Arlington Park riding titles when a spill during the 2009 Arlington Matron left him paralyzed from the waist down. He has generally shunned the sport since then, but he has engineered the purchase of two horses from his native Panama: Golden Moka, who won the $500,000 Prince of Wales Stakes at Woodbine in his first start after Douglas’s ownership group, the Old Friends Stable, bought him early in 2010, and Private Zone, who was undefeated in his Panamanian starts before being purchased and sent to trainer Doug O’Neill in California.
By the time the fireflies came out, I had decided this was one of the most magical nights of my life. It was June 20, the evening of the summer solstice. When I arrived at Stonestreet Farm in Lexington, Ky., a couple of hours earlier, an entrancing scene greeted me – the golden sunlight of late afternoon, a deep-blue sky, pastel-toned clouds.
In Panama City on the early evening of Feb. 18, 2011, Keiber Coa sat in his bedroom after a day spent at the famed Laffit Pincay Jockey School. He had been enrolled only a week. It was his first time away from home, he was nervous and scared, and he didn’t know anybody. But this was what he had decided − to be a jockey, like his father, Eibar, who had won more than 4,000 races and riding titles from New York to Florida and was then riding at Gulfstream Park.
His phone rang, and Keiber answered. It was his stepmother, Rebeca.
