The Triple Crown is on the line, and American Pharoah has one huge stat in his favor: he has beaten, it looks like, every horse set to line up against him; plus, the long-range forecast says it could rain on Saturday. Of course, he still has to be moving forward after his first two Triple [...]

Last week, Shamardal; this week, Teofilo, from Darley's Irish base at Kildangan Stud, grabbed the headlines. The European racing season is now in full swing, and last weekend's Irish Guineas meeting at The Curragh featured, besides a vintage Ryan Moore ride to extricate Gleneagles from a serious pocket just in time to get home in [...]

If you look at Progeny PP Counts for the last 90 days on the TDN website (click here), you'll see that the top 10 North American and European sires during this period each had 30 or more 'unique progeny' register 36 or more total listings. Regular readers of this column will not be surprised to [...]

From 1997 until 2008 or 2009, commercial breeders and the auction marketplace loved first-year sires. One cynic said to me that's because nobody has had a bad one yet, and when you consider that, according to APEX findings, something like 92% of runners do not pay their way, it's not hard to understand the logic. [...]

The GI Kentucky Oaks isn't officially a Classic, nonetheless last Friday's edition was one of four Classic or (shall we say) Classic-standard races run last weekend: the Oaks and GI Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, and England's one-mile Guineas Classics, the G1 English 2000 Guineas for colts on Saturday, and the G1 English [...]

Of course you're familiar with the old saying, “its price got shorter while it was sitting in the barn.” That was pretty much the case after two rounds of Classic trials the last two weekends in Britain, Ireland, and France. In spite of in-and-out results for their >sighters' (War Envoy [War Front], fourth in the [...]

In my 40-some years of reading form and betting on horses, one of the best angles I've ever found has to do with staying 10 furlongs, not nine furlongs, especially at Churchill Downs. I can recall three occasions in which this principle resulted in big payoffs. The first was in the 1993 Breeders' Cup Classic, [...]

With next Saturday's GI Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park (100 points to the winner) and Keeneland's GIII Coolmore Lexington S. (10 points) the only remaining Derby preps with points, there are now eight colts which dominate the GI Kentucky Derby discussion, pending the confirmation of American Pharoah (Pioneerof the Nile) as one of those 'elite [...]

As we have mentioned before, once a horse shows up as an A Runner on one of our annual lists it goes into a separate file, which we call 'Unique' A Runners, where they are only counted once, whereas in the rolling 7-year APEX files, a horse is counted once every year it reaches the [...]

Mid-year APEX figures run by TJCIS (The Jockey Club Information Systems), through last weekend's racing, tend to confirm some interesting trends among the population of major sires. There is still a super-exclusive club, now numbering five, of the world's top sires. Leading Sires, Apex A Runner Index, 1999 – 2005These five all have 1999-2005 APEX [...]

It was not very many years ago that winter meant a complete shutdown of flat racing in Britain and Ireland, with only Cagnes-sur-Mer keeping the doors open in France. When that was the case, we could forget about tracking European second-crop sires, whose first foals were about to begin racing at three, until pretty much [...]

Shared Belief's romp (Beyer 111) in Saturday's GI Santa Anita H. propelled his sire, Lane's End's Candy Ride, to the number two spot on the TDN Year-to-Date North American General Sire List (click here), behind only Gainesway's super-sire, Tapit, who had his 15th Grade I winner from seven crops of 3-year-olds (of 2015) when Ring [...]