The California Retirement Management Account (CARMA) has unveiled the CARMA Placement Program, a new service to assist owners and trainers in the placement of Thoroughbreds in need of retirement. The program was created via funding from the Santa Anita Park After-Care Program, an initiative to support racehorse retirement created by owner-breeder Frank Stronach.

The CARMA Placement Program will facilitate the transition of horses from the racetrack to an approved CARMA Aftercare Partner, non-profit benefactors of the organization's grant funds, for placement into a new home.

Multiple graded stakes-placed Roi Charmant, who stands at Magali Farms in Santa Ynez, Calif., was represented by his first winner on Saturday, when Pheisty Kid took a maiden special weight race at Golden Gate Fields.

Pheisty Kid, a 2-year-old bay gelding out of the multiple stakes-winning Lyphaness mare Pheiffer, covered 4 1/2 furlongs in :52.42 over Golden Gate’s synthetic Tapeta Footings surface for owner Billy Hipwell and trainer Sergio Ledezma. He finished third in his debut at Golden Gate last month.

Await the Dawn, a Group 2-winning son of leading sire Giant’s Causeway, will begin his stallion career at Summerhill Stud in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.

The 6-year-old horse, bred in Kentucky by Juddmonte Farms, won six of 13 career starts, earning $656,096. Racing for Michael Tabor and Susan Magnier, Await the Dawn won three consecutive group stakes from 2010 to 2011, taking the Group 3 Kilternan Stakes, the Group 3 Huxley Stakes, and the Group 2 Hardwicke Stakes. The latter win came at the famed Royal Ascot meeting.

Saturday’s Belmont Stakes undercard assisted in clarifying several divisions as the North American summer racing season unofficially began.

Grade 1 winner and freshman sire Dixie Chatter was represented by his first winner June 7 when his daughter Chattering Nikita captured a maiden special weight event at Northlands Park.

From a statistical viewpoint, the late Sadler’s Wells was the greatest sire in English and Irish Thoroughbred history. Not only did he lead the combined English/Irish sire list for a record 13 consecutive seasons and a record 14 times overall (beating records set by Highflyer two centuries earlier), but he sired 329 stakes winners, a record for a horse who served only in the Northern Hemisphere.

Dr. William Lockridge, influential breeder and co-founder of Ashford Stud in Versailles, Ky., died June 8 at the age of 81.
A veterinarian by trade, Lockridge graduated from Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine at age 21 and practiced in the Southwest for 12 years.

He founded the venerable Ashford Stud with business partner Robert Hefner in the mid-1970s. There, Lockridge quickly developed a business relationship with W. T. Young of Overbrook Farm and was a catalyst in the mating that produced world-class sire Storm Cat at several points along the way.

When Orb won the Kentucky Derby on May 4, it marked the seventh time in the past 10 years that a homebred has worn the garland of roses. Orb’s victory proved to be a popular one with racing fans, but even more so with those who have followed the sport for a long time and have an appreciation of its history, as it cast the spotlight on the breeding operations of Orb’s owners and breeders, the Janney and Phipps families, and highlighted the role played by Claiborne Farm, where the colt was foaled and raised.

Curlin, arguably one of the best two or three U.S. horses of the 2000s, dominated racing headlines during his 2007 and 2008 campaigns, providing racing fans with a handful of superior performances on the track and plenty of intrigue elsewhere as well. The all-time earnings leader in North America, Curlin was naturally highly regarded as a potential standout sire upon his retirement in 2008 to William S. Farish III’s Lane’s End in Versailles, Ky.

Palace Malice’s victory in the Belmont Stakes represented an all-encompassing triumph for William Stamps Farish III's Lane’s End, which bred the colt and stands his sire, Curlin.