Tom Knust

The 2025-26 Classic Meet at Santa Anita wrapped Sunday as jockey Emisael Jaramillo, trainer Doug O'Neill, and owner Kretz Racing stood atop their respective categories as leading rider, trainer, and owner, the track announced Monday evening. Leading rider at Gulfstream Park, Jaramillo won 50 races from 229 mounts at the Great Race Place, a 22 percent strike rate, in his first season riding full-time at Santa Anita Park. Of that total, six were stakes races including the GIII San Marcos and the GIII Santa Ana Stakes. Jaramillo's mounts earned a...

Most with a story to tell regale audience and bystander around the dinner table or the campfire or at the bar. More disciplined souls sit at the typewriter to memorialize it in print. But what possesses someone to then take that memoir and distill it into a screenplay, fundraise a small retirement account for a movie of that screenplay that you'll direct yourself before premiering the finished product in a packed Los Angeles movie theater for a collection of SoCal racing glitterati? "The summer of my first year in college...

Jockey Antonio Fresu watched the 2023 GI Kentucky Derby on television. Though from Italy, he understood the importance of the race and knew that everybody, be it a jockey, trainer, owner, aspires to win it. But he had no reason to believe that he'd ever win the Derby, let alone ride in it. In late April of last year, just eight days before the Derby, he had started riding in the U.S. at Santa Anita. He was unknown and unproven to the trainers in the U.S. "I came here to...

After a long lifetime marked by notable wins on the racetrack and in the business world, prominent owner-breeder, entrepreneur and philanthropist Marty Wygod has passed away aged 84. "I have so many good memories of Marty Wygod. I was telling Emily [Bushnell, Wygod's daughter] this morning, one of my favorite things about Marty was he had a great sense of humor," said trainer John Shirreffs, who conditioned some of Wygod's heaviest hitters on the track. Wygod, said Shirreffs, was also something of a prankster. "The first time I met him...

Jockey Antonio Fresu, currently second in the jockey's standings at Del Mar with 31 wins, has been suspended a total of 32 days by the California stewards for overuse of the whip. Fresu's suspension runs from Sept. 8 through Oct. 9. He was also fined $1,242. The suspensions came in the form of six separate rulings from the California Horse Racing Board, including two issued Sept. 4. According to CHRB spokesman Mike Marten, while the CHRB issued the rulings, it was only enforcing rules set forth by the Horse Racing...