SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Trainer Phil Johnson has a much better chance of winning Saturday's $1 million Travers Stakes with 3-year-old Volponi than he did the last and only other time he ran a horse in the race.
In 1978, Johnson sent out Nasty and Bold in the Travers. Although it was only a four-horse field, two of the participants were Triple Crown winner Affirmed, and Triple Crown bridesmaid Alydar, who finished second to Affirmed in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Thursday at Saratoga is the calm before the Grade 1 stakes storm. Beginning Friday with the $400,000 Personal Ensign, four Grade 1 stakes will be run during the course of three days, including Saturday's $1 million Travers.
In the meantime, Thursday's card lacks a stakes event. A third-level allowance, worth $47,000, serves as the featured eighth race. A decent field of seven 3-year-olds and older horses entered the seven-furlong race.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Just moments after Tempera blazed through her final workout for Sunday's Grade 1 Del Mar Debutante, the cell phone of her trainer, Eoin Harty, rang. It was Bob Baffert, who trains another top 2-year-old filly, Habibaty, feigning ignorance as to when Tempera was going to work.
"He said he didn't realize that was her," Harty said, laughing. "Bull."
ETOBICOKE, Ontario - Cosa Rara will attempt to become the winningest horse at the 2001 Woodbine meet in Thursday's eighth race, an $80,000 claimer for 3-year-old fillies going a mile on the turf.
Seven runners have won four races at this stand, including Cosa Rara, who has accomplished the feat in just four starts. Her five-race win streak began in her final 2000 outing and continued in the spring, when she captured consecutive $40,000 claimers, at seven furlongs and 1 1/16 miles.
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. - His stable is so massive and farflung that, more often than not, Steve Asmussen resorts to watching his racehorses from afar.
On Monday evening, for example, Asmussen was in Arlington's Trackside simulcast facility, keeping tabs on several of his horses in action at Louisiana Downs.
With nearly 200 horses under his care, winning races is just one part of doing business for Asmussen - so there was no whooping and hollering at Asmussen's table when Pemina triumphed as the odds-on favorite in the 10th and last race.
DEL MAR, Calif. - After one aborted comeback effort, Crafty C.T. starts anew at Del Mar on Thursday in a one-mile allowance race designed to start his fall campaign. He faces nine rivals, none of whom has accomplished as much as Crafty C.T., and none of whom are as talented.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - With his chestnut coat looking like a freshly minted copper penny, and without displaying any of the bad-boy tendencies that have become his trademark, Point Given arrived Tuesday afternoon at Saratoga, where he will be the overwhelming choice to win Saturday's $1 million Travers Stakes.
GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Lone Star Park, which has been dark since its Thoroughbred meet closed July 15, will play host to the Fasig-Tipton Texas summer yearling sale on Monday and Tuesday, Aug. 27-28. A total of 401 yearlings have been cataloged to the annual sale, sponsored by the Texas Thoroughbred Association.
A Muslim funeral service was scheduled to be held Wednesday in Philadelphia for jockey Isiah Sala, who died from injuries suffered during a spill last Sunday at Marquis Downs in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Sala, 23, was the leading rider at Marquis Downs.
The StarPhoenix, a Saskatoon daily, reported that eight of Sala's relatives and his girlfriend, 18-year-old Cassie Parker, traveled from Philadelphia to Saskatoon on Monday.
Sala has family in the Middle East, including his parents and two of his three younger brothers, who live in Jerusalem.
ALTOONA, Iowa - Saturday evening's co-feature at Prairie Meadows was an invitational for Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses at 440 yards, but few people got to see the race.
Special Referral flipped after the field was loaded in the gate, necessitating a late scratch, and the remainder of the field was backed out of the gate. The track's television crew apparently was unaware that the runners were being reloaded into the gate and failed to record the race, so fans at simulcast outlets, as well as ontrack patrons watching on TV, could not see the race.
