Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., and Sam Houston Race Park in Houston, which both had closed their stable areas to horses shipping in from Louisiana due to the equine herpesvirus positives at Fair Grounds in New Orleans, each issued updated ship-in policies Saturday.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - There will be a pick six  carryover of $306,342 on Saturday at Aqueduct after the wager was not hit for a third consecutive card.

NEW ORLEANS – Provided the status quo holds and there are no further cases of the equine herpesvirus at Fair Grounds in the coming days, the track will begin accepting shippers again next week. Offtrack horses are entered to race on the Friday, Jan. 27, card.

The Spendthrift Juvenile Stallion Stakes at Churchill Downs will be split into two divisions for the 2017 renewal, with the addition of a race for fillies.

Spendthrift Farm will also increase its contribution to the races from the $300,000 offered during the inaugural running last year to $400,000, which will be split evenly between the male and female divisions of the race to give each one purses of $200,000.

Jessies First Down, a winner of five stakes at five tracks in three states, was named the 2016 World Champion Quarter Horse in a ceremony at Heritage Place in Oklahoma City on Wednesday evening.

Jessies First Down won 8 of 13 starts and earned $430,042 in 2016, winning stakes at Hialeah Park, Sam Houston, Lone Star Park, Zia Park, and Sunland Park. A 5-year-old in 2016, Jessies First Down was named the champion aged horse and champion aged gelding.

Delaware Park will hold an 81-day season in 2017 – the same number of days as last year – but has moved its opening day back two weeks on the calendar.

Instead of opening on Preakness Day, as the track did last year, Delaware will open Saturday, June 3. The season will continue deeper into the fall and conclude Oct. 21.

John Mooney, the executive director of racing at Delaware Park, said the change was made to increase field size.

The New York Racing Association would be able to appoint the majority of its board members under a proposal submitted to the legislature late Tuesday night by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The proposal, which is contained in Cuomo’s 2017 state budget, would allow NYRA to select eight members to a reconstituted 15-member board, with six members selected by the governor. The association’s chief executive would fill the final spot.

LEXINGTON, Ky. - The purse of the Grade 3 Lexington Stakes at Keeneland here has been raised to $200,000 from $150,000 due to a sponsorship agreement between the track and Stonestreet, the racing and breeding operation owned by Barbara Banke, the track announced on Tuesday.

The Lexington, which is restricted to 3-year-olds and is run at 1 1/16 miles on the main track, is scheduled for April 15 this year, three weeks prior to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. The race has been run continuously since 1984.

Representatives of the New York racing industry and the community of Saratoga Springs urged a committee of lawmakers on Tuesday to return control of the New York Racing Association to a private board while lashing out at a recent maneuver by a casino that has reduced subsidies to the industry by millions of dollars.

An attorney for Mario Serey Jr. on Tuesday argued at a hearing in front of the stewards at Penn National Racecourse that a recent spate of positives in the trainer’s barn for the regulated medication clenbuterol was the result of sabotage, the attorney said.

Alan Pincus, who has represented several trainers in Pennsylvania in medication cases over the past several years, said that he told the stewards on Tuesday that Serey had strong reason to believe that an employee he fired late last year had administered clenbuterol to the horses without Serey’s knowledge.