Keeneland

Sent off as the 11-2 fourth choice in a field of six for Sunday's Yau Ma Tei Plate, the first griffin race of the year in Hong Kong, Sunny Star (Flatter) flopped out of the gates, but came with a stinging rally inside the final 200 meters to open his account at first asking, defeating 6-5 favorite Smiling Face (GB) (Acclamation {GB}) by 2 1/4 lengths. Chancheng Prince (Carpe Diem) raced prominently throughout and stuck on gamely for third. Sunny Star hopped in the air just as the gates flew...

Keeneland's 2020 September Yearling Sale will begin as planned Monday, Sept. 14, the sales company asserted in a press release Friday. "This auction is vital not only to Keeneland, but to the entire Thoroughbred industry and the Central Kentucky community at large," Keeneland President and CEO Bill Thomason said. "The Keeneland sales team is moving forward full steam with plans for the September Sale. Like every aspect of life right now, there are unknowns and we do not have all the answers yet. However, one thing is certain: We are...

While the coronavirus pandemic's most notable interruption to the world of horse racing has been the lack of, well, horses racing, many of the gears normally turning behind the scenes of the sport have been slowed or halted altogether as well. That includes the sales circuit, which has gone dark for several months as stay-at-home orders and bans on mass gatherings have, in some cases belatedly, trickled in to nearly all of the 50 states. As timing would have it, that shutdown basically covers all of 2-year-old sale season aside...

The TDN Writers' Room podcast presented by Keeneland has transitioned to video over the past two weeks as the hosts record the show from home, and this week they welcomed their first video guest, none other than four-time defending Eclipse Award-winning trainer and future Hall of Famer Chad Brown. In a wide-ranging interview that touched on how the pandemic has affected his horses and family, what he looks for at sales, his feelings on clenbuterol, his thoughts on how to help smaller trainers get a foothold and his memories of...

The commercial kitchen at Keeneland Race Course will serve as the epicenter for a production facility that will use displaced Lexington-area hospitality workers to prepare and deliver free meals to people and organizations that need them in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Marc Therrien, the executive chef and managing director of Keeneland's hospitality, is overseeing the association's integration of volunteer efforts with FoodChain and Nourish Lexington, which are two charitable groups collaborating to use the skills and talents of local chefs, businesses, farms, funders, and nonprofit agencies in order...

   TDN is proud to partner with the Keeneland Library and the Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries in a very special collaboration: the Keeneland 'Life's Work' Oral History Project, a series of filmed interviews by TDN columnist Chris McGrath with significant figures in the Thoroughbred industry. An excerpt from current installment, with Dr. Gary Lavin, appears here. As Will Rogers said, the best doctors in the world are the veterinarians--because their patients can't talk. "And that's true," says Gary Lavin. "But at the same...

When asked at his Friday press briefing whether or not he will give tracks in his state permission any time soon to hold races without fans in the stands, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear made it clear that he will require the tracks to stay closed for the foreseeable future. "At least as long as you are seeing an escalation (of the coronavirus), you would still have to have groups of people that would have to come together to make that happen," he said. "It would be the same as the...

Thursday was supposed to be opening day at Keeneland's spring meet, which has been canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, officials who oversee the association's racecourse and sales company spent their afternoon on a video conference call with the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission (KHRC)'s race dates advisory committee explaining how Keeneland will face a situation that is markedly different from the state's other four Thoroughbred tracks when emergency public health mandates are relaxed enough to allow live racing to resume. Bob Elliston, Keeneland's vice president of racing and sales,...

Nourish Lexington, an initiative to utilize hospitality workers recently unemployed due to the COVID-19 closings as well as other community food assets to provide prepared meals to those who need immediate access to food, has been created by several Central Kentucky community organizations, including Keeneland. FoodChain, with support from the E.E. Murry Family Foundation, Keeneland and VisitLEX, formed Nourish Lexington as a model collaboration to use the skills and talents of local chefs, businesses, farms, funders and nonprofit agencies in order to feed our hungry community members. Other generous donors...

Fasig Tipton, Keeneland, Breeders' Cup offer emergency support to Visit Horse Country as Virtual Tours Spike Worldwide Attention on Kentucky's Horse Industry Two weeks ago, operations at Horse Country HQ switched tracks, along with many others, as we and our members began to absorb the realities around COVID-19. Faced with growing warnings about transmission, travel interruptions, and event cancellations or postponements, experiences at member locations became deprioritized in favor of caution and best practices. That Wednesday, Mar. 11, was the last day of normal operations before we began a record...

We are pleased to report we received a number of favorable responses to our first question and answer column. We also received several new questions which we are addressing at this time. Question #1: From a tax point of view, what should we do if the horses we bought to pinhook can now not be sold? Answer: As a result of the threat of COVID-19, many pinhookers are having second thoughts. Our normal transaction was to buy yearlings in 2019 for resale at the 2-year-old sales in March and April...

A lifelong racing fan, Angelo Freda decided to make his dream of racehorse ownership into a reality and, along with his son James, started Ilium Stables with the purchase of two yearlings at the 2018 Keeneland September Yearling Sale. Already with a stakes winner on its resume, the stable added a daughter of Into Mischief purchased for $200,000 at last week's OBS March sale. "This is something that I always had a dream about doing," Angelo Freda said. "But I didn't want to do it alone. My son does a...