Week in Review

There was a brief window of time about 15 months ago when 'TDN Rising Stars' Sierra Leone (Gun Runner) and Fierceness (City of Light) were well established sophomores on the Triple Crown trail, and they were joined by an intriguing new shooter, Deterministic (Liam's Map), who suddenly had "wiseguy" appeal for the 2024 GI Kentucky Derby based on just two well-spaced lifetime starts. Deterministic, too, had been named a 'Rising Star' as a juvenile off an Aug. 12, 2023, debut dirt sprint victory at Saratoga for trainer Christophe Clement. But...

The folks who fought to preserve racing at the Northern California's remote half-miler in Ferndale deserve tremendous respect and credit for soldiering on to the bitter end. Make no mistake, the cessation of racing at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds in the coastal region of NorCal definitely rates as "bitter." There is no sugarcoating this one like a sticky tuft of cotton candy from the midway of Humboldt County's charmingly rural fairgrounds, whose ties to the sport date to 1896. Advocates for racing at Ferndale (pop. 1,398), a Victorian village with...

The debate will continue to rage on. Should a horse run back in the GI Preakness, just two weeks after the GI Kentucky Derby, or should they skip the Preakness and wait for the GI Belmont? What's best for the horse? What's best for the sport? This year it was Sovereignty (Into Mischief). He was a comfortable 1 1/2 length winner over Journalism (Curlin) in the Derby. But instead of running back in two weeks, his connections announced that his next start will be in the June 7 Belmont. He...

This past weekend we were three weeks out from America's most historic and important horse race, and all was quiet on the GI Kentucky Derby front. Too quiet, in fact. Compared to pro and college team sports, which have expanded their wild-card and play-in formats to capitalize on the immediacy of games with win-or-go-home playoff berths on the line, the lead-up to the Derby has silently shifted in the opposite direction. Instead of maximizing the relevancy of making the final cut as the sport's main event nears, racing rolls out...

The goal of the Kentucky Derby points system should be to make sure the 20 best 3-year olds in the sport make it into the field. Churchill Downs has tweaked the system a couple of times over the years and the changes, for the most part, have been well received. It's a different story this year. Churchill has tweaked the system so that in any race with five horses or fewer the horses receive fewer points than races with six or more horses. The rule is clearly aimed at Santa...

If you want a historical prognosticator for success in the GI Kentucky Derby, you can't do much better than running well in the GI Florida Derby. The premier stakes for sophomores at Gulfstream Park has been around since 1952, and in 73 renewals, Florida Derby participants have gone on to win that year's Kentucky Derby 25 times-a better than 1-in-3 strike rate. For perspective, the next-most-productive preps are two far older races, the GI Champagne Stakes (which dates to 1867) and the GI Blue Grass Stakes (first run in 1911),...

For much of his career, Touchuponastar (Star Guitar) was regarded as a good Louisiana-bred. Nothing more. Coming into Saturday's GII New Orleans Classic, he had won 14 races from 20 starts, but 13 of those wins had come in Louisiana-bred company. He beat open company in the 2023 Delta Mile S., but had never won a graded stakes race. Nothing figured to change in the Classic as Touchuponastar, a $15,000 yearling purchase, was set to face Sierra Leone (Gun Runner), last year's 3-year-old male champion who cost $2.3-million at the...

In 1976, 23-year-old Trevor Denman took a vacation from his race calling gigs at three tracks in Natal, South Africa, to venture to the United States to see what racing in a different part of the world was like. Because it was January, he left in the middle of a long, hot summer at home, packing only lightweight clothing and traveling in a dapper Palm Beach suit. His wardrobe choices left him ill-prepared for the first several stops on his cross-country tour of America, which happened to be the winter...

Competing primarily on the difficult Kentucky circuit, Spuns Son had raced 32 times between the ages of 3 and 5 without ever once getting his picture taken in the winner's circle. But the Hard Spun gelding had managed to hit the board on eight occasions, and he had closed well enough in $16,000 and $12,500 maiden-claiming grass routes in Indiana and Virginia during the second half of 2024 to make trainer John F. Hill, Jr. think that dropping him in for a $5,000 tag going long over Turfway Park's Tapeta...

Actually, 2024 wasn't that bad of a year for horse racing. There were no major scandals and the rate of horses breaking down fell again. At the tracks under HISA's jurisdiction, it looks like the fatality rate for the year will be about 0.84 horses per 1,000 starters. Considering that same rate in 2009, the first year statistics were kept, was 2.00 per 1,000 shows just how far the sport has come. The GI Kentucky Derby was as thrilling a Triple Crown race as the sport has seen in some...

You'd think the nine-furlong GII Remsen S. might be a good measuring stick for GI Kentucky Derby potential because it's the only top-level, 1 1/8-miles American dirt race for juveniles before they turn three. But only three horses in the last 61 years-Thunder Gulch, Go For Gin and Pleasant Colony-have parlayed wins in the Remsen into a blanket of roses at Churchill Downs. Instead, in recent runnings, the Remsen has evolved into a pipeline for progress deeper into the 3-year-old season. Remsen winners have captured two of the last three...

Bob Baffert told TDN via text last week it would be "exciting" to have a horse run at Churchill Downs for the first time in more than three years. Four months ago, on July 19, the gaming corporation that owns the track rescinded a ruling-off it had imposed upon the Hall-of-Fame trainer in 2021 because of a string of drug positives in horses Baffert trained, including one in Churchill's most prominent race, that year's GI Kentucky Derby. The colt who tested positive for an overage of betamethasone was Medina Spirit,...