East of The Moon

You would want to go easy with that lot in the trailer. "Weekend had the box stall in the back by herself," Callan Strouss recalls. "She was the queen back there, and the boys were riding on the ground level." This was back in 1984 and, for Lane's End, a radical departure. Because when its longest-serving employee was first hired by William S. Farish III--longest, at any rate, since his old buddy Mike Cline retired as manager in 2020--there had been no sense that the farm might become what this...

When he succumbed to colic in October 2011, aged just 14, there was a poignant sense that Bernstein had never quite lived up to his glamorous billing. He was a celebrity even as an embryo, carried through the Keeneland ring at the 1996 November Sale by a $1.9 million mare--La Affirmed (Affirmed), the second most expensive broodmare auctioned in America that year--as a full-sibling to two graded stakes winners by Storm Cat. On his safe delivery, his dam's purchasers at Brushwood Farm sent Bernstein back the following November to defray...