When he set a course record while winning the 2021 Maryland Hunt Cup, Vintage Vinnie (Ire) rattled rails, trimmed grass blades, defied gravity, tested stopwatches and scared plenty of witnesses. The performance was akin to watching a Formula 1 car scream down a dirt road. Sure, he got there, and in record time. But it wasn’t necessarily pretty.
Del Carroll looked at his entries for Preakness Day 1972, and knew he needed help. The exercise girls would have to come back in the afternoon – walk over with the runners, help the grooms, hotwalk back at the barn.
Years ago, Maryland Horse editor Snowden Carter interviewed Murmur Farm’s Audrey Murray about the Thoroughbred business.
Knicks Go walked the shedrow, Brad Cox and his team said their last goodbyes and Liam Benson readied for the 1,000-plus-mile van ride from South Florida to Central Kentucky before one last check.
“Is there anything I need to tell the guys in Kentucky, anything we need to know about him?” said Benson, a stallion nominations assistant at Taylor Made Farm tasked with riding alongside Knicks Go in the back of a Brook Ledge van from Gulfstream Park to Nicholasville, Ky.
Labor Day, 1968. Chesapeake City, Md., and the surrounding equine community. Benny Miller thought he had the day off. His boss, Gene Weymouth, thought Miller was supposed to work. Thus ended 16 years of employment for Miller, and – unknowingly – began five decades and counting of impact on Thoroughbred racing in the Mid-Atlantic and beyond.
It’s a frosty morning at Three Pines Farm in the Worthington Valley in Maryland, and the view is magnificent as you look across the gently rolling land that comprises the roughly 76-acre breeding farm.
Joe Coles, racing fan, sat in the stands at Monmouth Park one afternoon in 1992 or so and turned to his friend Joe Zoppi. “If you ever get something that looks good,” Coles told the veteran trainer, “maybe I’ll buy a horse.”
Your father’s a renowned musician, your mother an accomplished oil painter. But you’re a kid moved more by a yawning summer in the cottage dad bought on Cobbetts Pond. There in the green, green wonder of southern New Hampshire, a stranger pulls up in a flashy orange car. Suddenly the music soars and colors burst without note or brushstroke.
Even in the sport of kings, a world highlighted by trips to the winner’s circle, blankets of flowers, gleaming trophies, crowds of cheering fans and proud connections joined together in victory, tragedy strikes. Hard and fast, like a lightning strike, with enough force to break hearts, raise questions and deplete faith.
