In hockey — a sport that I know fairly well, having played it since I was seven years old — there’s a tradition called the playoff beard.
When a team enters the Stanley Cup playoffs, members of the team, individually or as a group, pledge to grow their beards until they bring the Cup home (or [...]
Rick Dutrow, trainer of the best three year-old in America, has been notified that he’ll be suspended for 15 days by the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority for a drug offense.
Again.
Dutrow has a rap sheet that includes more than 30 pages of violations (not all of which are drug violations, to be fair). You can [...]
Two high-profile horsemen are in the news today for newly minted suspensions they’ve received.
Horse racing’s penalty box is unfortunately filling up.
Rick Dutrow, trainer of Big Brown, faces a 15 day suspension in Kentucky after his horse, Salute the Count, tested with twice the allowable limit of clenbuterol following his second-place finish in the Aegon Turf [...]
T.S. Eliot wrote that the “greatest treason [is] to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” Racing, in its stop-and-start initiative to control drugs, will likely be forced to do the right thing for the right reason — the health and well-being of the horse. That’s because the wrong reason — public [...]
For a time after September 11, 2001, as if by universal agreement, sports commentators and even athletes steered away from the old standby of comparing sports to war, the sacrifice of athletes to that of soldiers.
Harry Aleo, the crusty Northern California horse owner who died over the weekend at age 88, understood the wisdom of [...]
Wednesday, as the escalator bore me down to the paddock at Monmouth, an email buzzed my Iphone: “Congratulations, Erin and Frank!” it began.
A scan brought good news: our filly The Big Four Oh is pregnant.
Names are already chosen, male and female, lodging already secured for her and her offspring. Now all we have to [...]
In a week with plenty going on — Congressional hearings, major races (including the Queen’s Plate and Colonial Turf Cup), and the possibility that anti-drug horsemen Larry Jones and Jim Squires may have been framed in a recent drug positive (here, and a tip of the cap to the Paulick Report for highlighting the tale) [...]
You knew the fix was in for yesterday’s hearings on Capitol Hill regarding horse racing as soon as the title of the hearing was released: “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred.”
And any lingering doubts one may have harbored were resolved when Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), sitting [...]
It’s the oldest game in the world: blaming somebody else.
In horse racing, it has a long and honored history.
Trainers think that all jocks are pinheads and that most lost races are the result of the pinheads’ propensity to make bad decisions. Jockeys get horses buried down at the rail, or hung out too [...]
With Congress breathing down its neck, the racing industry, in the form of Racing Commissioners International, has gathered and released statistics on deaths among rachorses (including thoroughbreds, standardbreds, and quarter horses).
How you interpret those statistics, of course, determines whether the glass is half-full or half-empty.
Briefly, the RCI report, which compiles data from 19 of the [...]
