There are no days off for Lava Man, the 2015 Hall of Fame inductee.
At the age of 14, Lava Man thrives on activity. He is a pony for longtime trainer Doug O’Neill at Los Alamitos, guiding the stable’s young horses to and from the track.
“He wakes up every morning with a purpose,” O’Neill said on a recent morning at Del Mar. “He’s got such a leader’s mentality.”
“She still gets plenty of visitors to the farm. She loves her carrots,” Woodford Farm general manager Matt Lyons says of champion Xtra Heat, now a broodmare at the Versailles, Ky., farm. “Every time she hears the bag rustle, she knows her carrots are coming.”
Xtra Heat has earned those carrots many times over. The bargain-basement purchase became a Grade 1-winning multimillionaire, an Eclipse Award winner, and now a Hall of Famer. The Dixieland Heat mare will take her place in the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame in an induction ceremony Aug. 7 in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Through much of the 20th century, the name “Whitney” was synonymous with the very best of Thoroughbred racing. On Aug. 17, 1904, John Hay Whitney was born into this family of racing royalty – and into one of the largest private fortunes in America, amassed from oil, railroads, and tobacco – as the son of Greentree Stable founder Helen Hay Whitney and the paternal grandson, nephew, and cousin, respectively, of leading American owners William Collins Whitney, Harry Payne Whitney, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt II was born into the highest of society, his 1912 London birth announcement printed on the front page of the New York Times. The great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was 2 when he lost his father aboard the Lusitania and was raised thereafter by his mother, a racing fan and daughter of the millionaire Baltimore druggist who invented Bromo-Seltzer.
Despite the inroads feminism has managed in the last 40 years or so, we still live in a paternalistic culture. Women in the American workforce, on average, are paid only about 71 percent of the salary of men in the same jobs. In the Thoroughbred world, although stallions and mares both contribute 50 percent of the genes to each foal produced, it is the sires who tend to get most of the credit.
Grade 3 winner Went the Day Well will begin his stallion career at Las Zainas Farm in Uruguay.
The 6-year-old Proud Citizen horse retired with three wins in 16 career starts for earnings of $470,425. He is best known for his win in the Grade 3 Spiral Stakes in 2012, which led to a fourth-place finish in that year’s Kentucky Derby.
In today's DRF Breeding Today newsletter, we are introducing a new publication for readers -- the Weekly Stakes Report, which provides owners, breeders, and industry participants and fans with comprehensive results of all stakes races held in North America. Click here to download the first edition as a free PDF.
by Joe Nevills and Nicole Russo
Dual classic winner War Emblem, whose years at stud in Japan have been marked by frustration, has been pensioned from stallion duty, and terms have been reached to repatriate him to Old Friends Thoroughbred retirement farm in Georgetown, Ky., with an expected arrival in September.
Classic-placed Grade 1 winner Danza has been retired and will enter stud for 2016 at Spendthrift Farm in Lexington, Ky.
Danza, a 4-year-old son of Street Boss, will participate in Spendthrift's "Share the Upside" incentive program. The Share the Upside fee for Danza will be $5,500 stands and nurses, and breeders will earn a lifetime right after breeding a mare in each of Danza's first two seasons, producing two live foals, and paying both stud fees. Danza’s 2016 fee on a traditional, one-time contract will be $4,000 stands and nurses.
