It’s a day of odds and ends… Magna Bankruptcy As has been widely reported in both the blogosphere and — in a surprising twist — the mainstream media, Magna Entertainment, the company which owns Laurel Park and Pimlico (as well as Santa Anita and Gulfstream) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware. Oh, …
Category Archive: Claiming races
Sep 22 2008
Six inviolable rules to claiming horses
Occasionally — as in, very rarely — someone will ask me how we go about identifying the horses we claim. Usually, this question is asked in a semi-breathless manner, as if I just might be about to give them the key to life, the universe, and everything. As it happens, that’s about right. In fact, …
Sep 19 2008
Alumni Report
Toiling, as we mostly do, among the claiming horses of the world, turnover is an integral part of the equation. In other words, horse today, gone tomorrow. That’s not because we don’t want to keep the horses we buy. Very often, we watch them depart with more than a little regret. It’s because surviving in …
Jul 20 2008
Wanted: A living wage
One of the best steps that racing could take to improve the health and well-being of the largest number of horses is to raise purses, not for better horses but for worse ones: claiming horses, particularly bottom-level claimers. If need be — and it certainly would need to be — the money ought to come …
Apr 23 2008
Fish gotta swim, Gill’s gotta claim
The other day at Pimlico, track handicapper Frank Carulli announced that owner Michael Gill had claimed 56 horses in Maryland in the space of about one month, spending north of half a million dollars — and possibly pretty far north — in the process. Which, for those of you keeping score at home, is a …
Mar 31 2008
Attachment
Down in the post-race paddock at Laurel the other day, a familiar scene: an excited new owner, a trainer come to take possession of a horse he’s just claimed. But with a twist: a crying groom, cooling the horse out, snapping, “Give me a minute!” to the trainer, like a grieving relative saying one last …
Feb 22 2008
Staking a claim
Claimed a couple of horses in the last week or two (meet Untamed Hero and Wall Street Humor here), and it got me thinking of the differences between watching a race from which you’re planning to claim a horse versus watching a race in which your horse is running. There are similarities, of course. Either …
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