All those so avid to see how Flightline will fare in his second career should surely be gratified if he can prove as effective as the last champion to enter stud with anything approaching his freakish reputation. Two new stakes winners last Saturday, one on either coast, took Justify past 50 from four crops. (His [...]

A fairly quirky notion, perhaps, but let's just give it a little rein. Because it was in California that Collected reached his peak on the racetrack, including when beaten only by the Horse of the Year in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic; and it is also in California that he has been making his name [...]

After a weekend that flashed one talent after another, like a many-sided jewel rotating in the sun, it's hard to single out a dominant facet. But having previously explored the backgrounds of Golden Tempo (Curlin) and Nysos (Nyquist), let's start with the breakout performance of Englishman (Maxfield), author of a 115 Beyer in the GI [...]

Turning 40 does things to people. When Josh Isner reached the milestone, he took a look at the road ahead and asked himself a question. “Do I just want to get worse at golf every year for the rest of my life? Or do I want to try to go win the Kentucky Derby?” This [...]

Those of us most despondent to see the winner of the first leg sitting out the second can console ourselves, precisely on grounds of tradition, that an abbreviated GI Belmont Stakes would never have allowed a “proper” Triple Crown anyway. Even so, with Curlin obviously deploying a rather more important son at Saratoga this weekend, [...]

It's just like Wayne Lukas used to tell him. “One of these days you're going to get smart,” Lukas would say. “And you'll quit that. And come over to the Thoroughbred business.” This was when Bill Childs was still in the Quarter Horse game, and Lukas had already made the switch that transformed our sport. [...]

It was the most literal of dream scenarios. The thing is, it had happened before. From time to time, Valerie Mastromonaco will have a dream–always about a horse–and then something will happen to bring it to life. Nothing dramatic, most of the time. True, once she dreamed that a particular horse in the barn had [...]

She was claimed for $5,000 out of a race in which she bled badly. Yet here we are, 75 years later, celebrating Iltis (War Relic) as founder of a dynasty freshly decorated, coast to coast, on consecutive weekends. The moment of alchemy for Iltis was the transfer early in her breeding career to Ocala Stud, [...]

Horses long ago tutored Eoin Harty in the kind of coincidences that defy rational explanation, as we'll discover when reaching the story of Well Armed. But losing both parents inside a week, in February, was maybe not quite as bewildering as it may seem. As Harty says himself, after 66 happy years together, perhaps the [...]

Everybody knows Glennwood to be a paragon of its type yet somehow few farms seem able to treat it as a model. For one thing, John Gunther and his daughter Tanya have shown that ultimately there is nothing more commercial than putting winners under your mare, a rather inconvenient lesson for those who favor the [...]

As a template for attracting new blood to the game, Shane Felling is a pretty tough act to follow. Barely a year after pushing tentatively at the door, he has just had his first runner in a Classic. A few weeks prior to that, moreover, he found himself on the gallops at Ballydoyle with Aidan [...]

Having last week celebrated a first GI Kentucky Derby winner carrying the venerable black-and-cherry silks of the Phipps family, today we remind ourselves that the man who postponed that moment for 37 years has since built an iconic legacy of his own. In thwarting Easy Goer with Sunday Silence, in 1989, Arthur B. Hancock III [...]