Tim Thornton

Santa Anita has nominated five of the nation's top riders, Tyler Baze, Alex Birzer, Julien Leparoux, Jareth Loveberry and Tim Thornton, for the 77th George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award at Santa Anita Park, the track announced Friday. Since 1950, The Woolf Award honors riders whose careers and personal character earn esteem for the individual and the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing. One of the most prestigious awards in sports, the Woolf Award is voted on by their peers nationwide and can only be won once. The 2025 Woolf Award was...

State-bred and -sired programs in Louisiana, West Virginia and Maryland were in the spotlight over the weekend, and the while main events at Delta Downs, Charles Town Races and Laurel Park each featured heavily backed odds-on favorites, the results produced varying outcomes: A new track record, a double-digit-lengths blowout, and an upset of a Breeders' Cup-placed horse who had seemed like a cinch dropping down into restricted company. On Saturday at Delta Downs, Touchuponastar (Star Guitar) returned from a 4 1/2-month layoff in the co-featured $100,000 Gold Cup Stakes for...

Tim Thornton led the standings from start to finish to win his fourth riding title at Evangeline Downs when the Louisiana track concluded its 73-night season Monday. He finished the season with 96 victories from 385 mounts. Thornton also led the jockey colony in purse earnings with his mounts collecting $2,035,840. Allen Landry fended off a late stretch bid by Sam Breaux to win the trainer race by one victory--38 to 37, while Michele Rodriguez's Elite Thoroughbred Racing made it a three-peat in the owner standings. The operation had 21...

Touchuponastar (Star Guitar) could have won the Sunday stakes named for his sire practically by just showing up, but instead, connections took the path of greater resistance and allowed him to take his chance against the likes of Eclipse Award and GI Breeders' Cup Classic winner 'TDN Rising Star' Sierra Leone (Gun Runner) in Saturday's GII New Orleans Classic Stakes. Owned by former NFL quarterback Jake Delhomme's Set-Hut LLC, the Louisiana-bred played catch me if you can in front of a partisan crowd in the Big Easy and catch him...

Tim Thornton was the leading jockey and veteran conditioner Allen Landry was the top trainer at the Delta Downs meet which concluded Saturday. Thornton has now won five leading rider titles at Delta Downs dating back to the 2018-19 season, when he started a string of four consecutive titles before being unseated by Vicente Del Cid during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons. Del Cid missed the first month of the 2024-25 meet, but quickly rose through the ranks to finish in the standings. Thornton won 85 races from 352 mounts...

If it's Louisiana Champions Day, that means it's Touchuponastar (Star Guitar) day and the 5-year-old did not disappoint in winning the Champions Day Classic for the third consecutive season. Drawn widest while facing four others, the gelding poked his head in front with a circuit to travel and lobbed them along through a half-mile in :49.48 while tracked along by Benoit (Closing Argument). Held together on the turn by Tim Thornton, he remained under a double hammerlock while opening at will into the final furlong and cruised home untouched. The...

We are all the products of our environment. Tim Thornton could see as much, when he saw a foal that had been delivered at sea trying to walk on dry land for the first time. "He was, like, six weeks old," he recalls. "It was so funny to see him get off that ship, rocking everywhere, giving it the sea legs." But then that's pretty well how Thornton himself might have felt, as one born and bred for horses, had he ever been torn away to work in some other...

A lot of you will know the feeling. Day three of the January Sale, back ring, and your horse is coming back out after a matter of seconds. The digital board had stalled at $2,500, and then cleared. Bret Jones exchanged a grimace with farm manager Ben Henley. Pretty terrible, no getting away from it. But what can you do? It wasn't the first time Airdrie has had to cut its losses on a horse, and nor would it be the last. As his father has always told Bret: "Better...

Trainer Karl Broberg took his 11th consecutive Delta Downs leading trainer title; Broberg and Matt Johansen's End Zone Athletics, Inc. won their seventh straight leading owner title and 10th in the last 11 years; and Broberg's go-to local rider Tim Thornton sat atop the jockey standings for the fourth year in a row as the Vinton, LA bullring's 2021-2022 meet concluded Mar. 5. The Broberg barn saddled 105 winners and racked up $1,928,820 in earnings, coming close to matching its 107 wins and $2,017,120 during the 2018-2019 season. A total...

Jockeys Joe Bravo, Glenn Corbett, Julien Leparoux, Rodney Prescott and Tim Thornton make up the list of finalists for the prestigious 2022 George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award. Presented annually by Santa Anita since 1950, the award--named for the legendary and highly respected George "The Iceman" Woolf--"recognizes those riders whose careers and personal character garner esteem for the individual and the sport of Thoroughbred racing." Voted on by jockeys nationwide, the Woolf Award winner will be announced in February.

Strenuous safety-related objections from Delta Downs jockeys about the allegedly inconsistent lighting from a new system that has been installed and tweaked over the course of several months kept the Louisiana State Racing Commission (LSRC) from approving a return to night racing when regulators met for an emergency session to address that one item Monday morning. Mindy Coleman, an attorney representing The Jockeys' Guild, told commissioners on the Dec. 13 Zoom call that while the Delta-based riders recognize and appreciate the efforts track management has made to try to improve...