Special Rate, a leading Texas stallion, has been moved to Oklahoma for the 2016 breeding season. He will stand at Glasses Creek Ranch in Madill, Okla., the farm announced Friday. His fee will be $3,000.
Special Rate is a son of Pulpit and a half-brother to the multiple Grade 1 winners Sightseek and Tates Creek. Special Rate, who won the Bien Bien in 2003 at Hollywood Park, is the sire of such runners as Special U F O, who set a course record for 1 1/16 miles on turf at Retama Park.
A Texas Racing Commission request to extend funding for its administrative costs beyond Nov. 30 is under review, according to a representative of the state’s legislative budget board. The commission is operating under a temporary funding plan, and if its request is not granted by the end of the month, racing in Texas would be forced to shut down.
The legislative budget board has no scheduled meetings, but there does not need to be a vote on the request, according to the panel representative.
All-sources handle was up while ontrack handle was down at the 2015 Belmont Park fall meet, according to statistics released Friday by the New York Racing Association.
All-sources handle for the 38-day meet, which ran Sept. 11 to Nov. 1, was $315,826,290, a 7.2 percent increase from the $294,710,551 figure for the 38-day fall meet in 2014. Ontrack handle was $39,989,451, a 6.3 percent decrease from $42,697,719.
Total attendance at the Belmont fall meet was 108,246 up, 5.5 percent from the 102,566 reported in 2014.
This has been a year of change in Maryland racing, and on Nov. 20, the Maryland Jockey Club will hold a town-hall meeting at Laurel Park to discuss its future plans.
A summer meet was added at Laurel Park this year, and the racing schedule has been trimmed to three days a week since July as The Stronach Group, which owns Laurel and Pimlico Race Course, moves toward a year-round racing schedule.
Betting on Thoroughbred races at U.S. tracks was $970.3 million in October, according to figures released by Equibase on Wednesday, but a comparison to the same figure from last October is invalid because of the scheduling of the Breeders’ Cup.
This year, the two-day Breeders’ Cup event was held Oct. 30-31, while last year, the event was held Oct. 31 to Nov. 1. As a result, the October figures this year are upwardly skewed compared with last year.
A portion of a broadcast late on Saturday afternoon featuring American Pharoah’s victory in the Breeders’ Cup Classic drew a 2.6 overnight rating and six share, the highest rating and share for the race since 2010, according to NBC Sports, which broadcast the Friday and Saturday Breeders’ Cup races on its family of networks.
The signal from Churchill Downs will be broadcast this fall on Television Games Network for the first time in nearly a decade, according to officials for the track.
The return of the Churchill Downs signal to TVG is the result of a “few phone calls” over the past several days between officials of the track and the television network, according to John Asher, Churchill’s vice president of racing communications. The informal deal will allow TVG to broadcast Churchill’s races throughout the fall meet, which begins Sunday and runs through Nov. 29, Asher said.
DEL MAR, Calif. – California’s most popular racetrack is struggling to attract horses.
Del Mar, which has the highest all-sources handle in the state at its summer meeting, has carded eight races for Sunday, the final day of the first week of the autumn meeting.
The track scheduled nine races for Sunday but will have a shorter program after lower-than-expected support when entries were taken on Thursday. Sunday’s program will have a maximum of 57 runners, with two fields of six and three fields of seven. No race has more than eight entrants.
Churchill Downs Inc. had net income of $4.2 million in the third quarter, up $700,000, or 19 percent, over the same quarter last year, even as revenue for the company in the quarter jumped 61 percent to a record $279.8 million, according to financial documents released Wednesday.
