VEA: More discretion need in proposed Va. historical racing regs

by Nick Hahn | Jul 24, 2018 | Breaking, Business, Top Stories, Virginia, Virginia Business | 0 comments

The following appeared in The Racing Biz July 2nd.

by Frank Vespe

The Maryland Jockey Club on Monday announced that longtime Vice-President of Racing and Racing Secretary Georganne Hale would become Vice President of Racing Development, a newly created position within the company.

In that job, the company said, she will oversee the revitalization of the Washington, DC International turf race; assist with the Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred Championship (MATCH) Series; and “lead and monitor philanthropic initiatives with the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance, Beyond the Wire, and Canter for a Cause while serving as a liaison for backstretch programs.”

Congratulations to Belmont Derby Invitational winner Catholic Boy and his trainer, Jonathan Thomas, who is the son of Virginia Equine Alliance’s Track Superintendent, J.D. Thomas! The following article appeared in The Paulick Report July 8th. 

The last time Catholic Boy and Analyze It met in the Pennine Ridge, Analyze It took the lead only to have Catholic Boy wrest is back from him in the final strides. In Saturday’s Grade 1 Belmont Derby Invitational, those two made the turn for home in unison, leading to a thrilling stretch battle. Catholic Boy (5-1) had set the pace, but Analyze It (2-1) came on his outside and took the lead by a head. Refusing to give in, Catholic Boy fought back and got his head down first at the wire for owners Robert LaPenta, Madaket Stable, Siena Farm, and Twin Creeks Racing Stable. Ridden by Javier Castellano for young trainer Jonathan Thomas, the 3-year-old son of More Than Ready covered 1 1/4 miles over Belmont’s firm turf course in 1:59.28.

Catholic Boy won the 2018 Belmont Derby Invitational. Photo by Eric Kalet.

“What a stretch drive,” Thomas said. “My hats off to Analyze It [No. 3], he ran super. It was a hell of a horse race. He really has an awful lot of heart. I didn’t expect him to fight back this time. I thought we were going to finish a really good second, [but] somehow he got it done. He’s always been a real generous training horse. You never know how they will respond in that scenario because we never put them in that situation in the mornings. Between his heart and Javier’s ride, what can you say? We had no instructions before the race. We just wanted him to ride him by gut instinct and do what he thought was best.”

“It’s good for the sport to see two of the best 3-year-old horses on the turf run the way they did,” Castellano said. “They put a lot of effort, it’s two good horses and it can go either way. I’m very fortunate it went my way. I’m very respectful of Analyze It, he’s a great horse with a great trainer. Someone had to win the race, and I’m lucky to be in the spot I am.”

A photo finish showed Catholic Boy to be the winner by a head, relegating Analyze It to the place for the second start in a row. Hunting Horn rallied throughout the length of the stretch, but was able to do no better than third.

“This horse that won earned it,” said Chad Brown, trainer of Analyze It. “He came back and beat him [Analyze It], I don’t have any excuse. It sure seems that [Analyze It idles], but I don’t want to take anything away from the winner, because he still fought back and most horses wouldn’t. I thought he ran a great race, the winner, but so did our horse. He just wasn’t good enough.”

Bred in Kentucky by Fred W. Hertrich III & John D. Fielding, Catholic Boy was a $160,000 RNA as a short yearling at the Keeneland January sale. He has compiled a record of five wins from eight starts, earning over $1.2 million, and boasts graded stakes wins on both the turf and the dirt. The Belmont Derby was his first Grade 1 victory, though he had previously finished fourth twice in Grade 1 company.

“It’s the pinnacle,” said Thomas of his first Grade 1 win. “It’s one of those dreams you don’t really think about until it happens. I’m happier for him because he’s a deserving Grade 1 winner. He deserves it. I’m like a proud parent.”

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Copyright © 2018 Paulick Report.

Bird Mobberley’s No Refunds became the first horse to win a bonus in the new Virginia Certified Residency Program when the two year old filly kicked off Saturday’s card at Laurel with her first ever victory.

The Maryland-bred scored in gate-to-wire fashion in a $40,000 maiden special weight race. The winner, by Buffum out of More Punch by Partner’s Hero, held off runner-up Nosey Josy and finished 1 1/4 lengths the best at the 5 1/2 furlong distance. No Refunds  reached the winners circle in her fourth attempt. She had a pair of runner-ups in April and May and a fifth in June, all at Maryland tracks and all in the same class.

No Refunds is the first horse to win an Owners Bonus courtesy of the Certified Residency Program. Photo by Jim McCue.

“Winning the first bonus from the certified program was exciting,” said Mobberly. “I was nervous because it was a hot, hot afternoon at Laurel. There were seven horses in the race but two of them (Bye Bye Bertie and Peace Corps) were scratched after they slipped in the gate. The other horses had to be reloaded two separate times and by the process of elimination, my horse became the favorite.”

No Refunds was one of four horses Mobberley’s trainer, John Salzman Jr, sent to Stephanie Nixon’s Horseshoe Hill Farm in Ashland, Virginia last July to become eligible for the residency program. “They normally would send horses in September or October but because of the new program, they sent them earlier,” said Nixon. “I’ve been breaking horses for the Salzman’s for the last 15 years. They are my main client and beyond that, we’re just good friends. Their business over the years allowed me to build a new barn at the farm.”

No Refunds appears in the Laurel winners circle with owner Bird Mobberley and jockey Jevian Toldeo. Photo courtesy of Jim McCue.

​”Stephanie and John are always in sync and work so well together,” said Mobberley. “They haver a great relationship and seem to know when a horse is ready. All I do is get in the way,” she joked.

​”All the horses that stayed at Horseshoe Hill for six months last year are in my stable mail so I can track how they all progress,” said Nixon. “I knew No Refunds had been getting close to winning, so I was extremely excited on Saturday. John (Salzman) is very quiet by nature, but he thinks I’m crazy by how excited I can get.”

Nixon said the Mobberley family have always been “old school” when it comes it comes to horsemanship and they take pride in that. “Gretchen, Bird’s mother who passed away two years ago, galloped horses until she was 82 years old. They are great people and it was a thrill to be part of that first certified program win, and especially for a Maryland-bred horse.”

With the victory, Mobberley scored a 25% Virginia Certified owners bonus in addition to the $29,640 winner’s share of the purse, which included some Maryland Breeders Fund money as well. A horse is eligible for a bonus if it maintains residency in Virginia for any six month consecutive period prior to December 31st of its two year old year. It must maintain that residency at a Virginia-Certified Farm or Training Center. A list with contact information can be found at www.vabred.org. Owners of those Virginia-Certified horses are then eligible for a 25% bonus for non-Virginia restricted wins at Mid-Atlantic racetracks (NY, NJ, PA, MD, WVA, DE).

The following appeared in The Paulick Report July 3rd and was written by Natalie Voss.

These days, it seems the answer to almost any question of Thoroughbred history can be found either in the stacks of the Keeneland Library or the archives at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. But there was a time when your average fan or journalist couldn’t access either.

In the 1950s, Virginia horseman George Ohrstrom saw this as a problem. Over the years, Ohrstrom, a book collector himself, became concerned at how difficult it was for people outside academia to access historical works about equestrian sport. He also realized the most important volumes were scattered across various public libraries and private collections around the country, including his own. In 1954, he founded the National Sporting Library in a small brick building in downtown Middleburg, Va., uniting equestrian and field sport histories under one roof.

Now, the library has grown to 26,000 books, documents, and works of art, housed in a multi-story building next to the National Sporting Art Museum. Its archives include numerous records of early American and British horse racing but include other country sports, too.

“I like to tell people that if it’s a sport that was practiced in a Jane Austen novel, we cover it here,” said John Connolly, head librarian. “As a matter of fact, we started seeing a lot of increased interest when Downton Abbey started showing steeplechase races and things.”

“We don’t have a regular operational acquisitions budget for the library. We’re reliant on whatever people bring us,” he said. “Everything in the collection is donated, not purchased, which means our collection is a reflection of the sporting public and always has been.

“A lot of our donations are brought in cardboard boxes. ‘This was in my grandmother’s attic, this was in my uncle’s basement.’ What we’re finding now is the younger generations generally don’t collect books, so when their parents pass, they bring those to us.”

(Connolly clearly hasn’t seen my office, but I have no doubt he’s right about the trend.)

The library has been lucky over the years to be gifted a number of rare volumes, housed in a climate-controlled basement room accessible by appointment only. Some of the books housed there tell the story of a stable or sport’s evolution over time. One of the most unique specimens is a ledger book kept in a barn near Paris from 1752 to 1766 tracking the horse and carriage expenses for a well-to-do family over the course of time. Connolly leafs through it carefully, showing visits from the farrier (who at that time, also served as a veterinarian), carriage repainting costs and also the family’s change in fortune as the French economy changed after the French and Indian War.

The ledger book is dotted with burns from candle embers and records horsekeeping expenses from the 1700s

“Almost all of the entries are for hay and oats, which tells me in 300 years of owning horses, not much has changed,” Connolly joked.

Visitors can trace the evolution of racing over time, too. Connolly gestures to shelves full of bound editions of The Spirit of the Times and Turf, Field and Farm newspapers. Both were based in New York and were among the top five in circulation in the state in the mid- to late 1800s. Both predated The Jockey Club and tried their best to report on racing and breeding news despite having no centralized recordkeeping system. In fact, the rival publications relied on volunteers around the country to record and mail in results from race meetings or write up short news items which could include turf news, gossip, cattle price updates, or tips for fishermen.

Although it’s clear horse racing was taking place in the United States prior to the 1890s, Connolly said it’s very difficult to track. Horses sometimes changed names when they changed owners (which could happen frequently), and some were recorded as part of pedigrees by their physical descriptions if they had no formal name. In later decades, horsemen were left to puzzle over pedigrees that could be composed in part of entries like ‘Mr. Smith’s Gray Mare.’ And there was another problem.

“A lot of research materials from antebellum racing get lost with the Civil War,” said Connolly. “You see with the American stud book, they start in the 1870s. There’s a significant attempt later to fill the gap from 1861 to 1870, which was never recorded, and trying to trace those bloodlines. The impact of the Civil War was tremendous on record-keeping.”

The good news for a researcher of a successful racehorse during this period is that a popular runner usually stuck around season after season at a time when a horse could win more on the track than he could earn in the stud barn.

“Now, the perspective is you get some really good wins, you immediately retire the horse and put him out to stud because he’s more valuable. That wasn’t the perspective back then,” Connolly said. “A lot of these horses, they get retired because no one wants to race against them anymore because they’re completely unbeatable.”

Although the rare book room is primarily books and periodicals (the oldest one being a book on the rules of dueling, published in the 1500s), it contains a few other horsey treasures, too. Connolly pulled a small leather-bound book with gold gilt-edged pages. It was a copy of the Bible from the 1800s, but when one side of the closed book was pressed down and lifted back slightly, a detailed painting suddenly became visible along the sides of the pages.

With a tilt of the pages, a foxhunting painting becomes visible along the edge of this book

Librarians have discovered these ‘fore-edge’ paintings sometimes quite by accident on books already in the collection., One can only see them when the pages are angled and pulled back slightly but not open. The Library contains a series of books with a variety of watercolors added in this manner—some depicting hunting, fishing, and falconry, and one showing a steeplechase. Books were not purchased this way, but rather paintings were done at home with the assistance of a special clamp that would allow the painter to add layers of pigment to the very far edges of the book’s pages. Most fore-edge paintings show landscapes or religious iconography, but the owner who donated this set to the Sporting Library had other images on his or her mind.

One of the most fascinating items in the rare book room is a panoramic scroll by illustrator Henry Thomas Alken titled ‘Going to the Epsom Races.’ A thin strip of illustrated paper was designed to be viewed through a slit in the paper’s round wooden case and wound across the slit to create a sense of movement – sort of like a precursor to children’s viewfinder toys.

Connolly holds a segment of the Alken illustration of a trip to the races at Epsom

Alken wanted to give people the sense of what it was like to travel to, and arrive at, Epsom on the day of an important heat. The start of the scroll shows people and horses in working class attire and carriage. A few people are riding to the races in a hay wagon, their faces peeking out from a green pile. As the scroll continues, the race patrons become higher class, but there is a feeling of mayhem beginning. A gentleman is shown running across the landscape chasing his riderless horse. A group of carriage horses are beginning to spook, upsetting the fancy ladies behind them. One particularly well-coiffed fellow is on the ground, nearly underneath his bucking horse. As the racecourse becomes visible, the travelers fade away and you see the start of a two-mile heat on the Epsom turf course.

“Alken loved to depict the disastrous, untrained gentleman rider who had no idea what he was doing on horseback. Anywhere that riders are saying, ‘We know what we’re doing’ he’s there to say, ‘No you don’t,’” said Connolly. “These [scrolls] were tremendously popular in the early 19th century when people were beginning to play around with optical illusion. The intention is to give you some light entertainment as you come in, but then to give you the impression of what it would look like if you were actually there. That became the guiding principle for this method of portrayal, the panoramic view.”

Connolly hopes one day some of these rare treasures can be available to the public digitally. The library is completing a multi-year reorganization and cataloguing of its many volumes, and there are several which need to be painstakingly restored. Although demands on time and funding are great, he envisions digitizing some of the older resources in the rare book room, but it’s not a simple task. Old books can’t be opened and pressed flat on a conventional scanner. Libraries looking to digitize delicate pages must invest in a high-resolution camera to capture an image of each page from above. Once hundreds of images are taken to capture a book, those large digital files must be stored somewhere, and a software system implemented to allow someone to access them through the library’s website. It’s a daunting task, but one which librarians around the country are embarking on, one volume at time.

In the meantime, if you want to see the treasures in the library’s basement, you’ll need to take a jaunt to Middleburg – a great excuse to visit Virginia’s horse country.

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Copyright © 2018 Paulick Report.

The following appeared in The Paulick Report June 30th.

At seven years of age, Madaket Stable, Ten Strike Racing and Steve Laymon’s Long On Value earned his first Grade 1 victory in Saturday’s Highlander Stakes at Woodbine Racecourse. The intact son of Value Plus ran down filly Lady Alexandra to win by about a neck on the wire, completing six furlongs over the firm turf in 1:07.13. Ridden by Florent Geroux and trained by Brad Cox, Long On Value’s win as the 2-1 favorite earned him an expenses-paid berth to the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint this fall at Churchill Downs.

Long On Value was wide around the turn, and seemed to hesitate a bit in mid-stretch, but Geroux got the horse to change leads and timed his rally perfectly to hit the wire about a neck in front of Lady Alexandra. Holding Gold fought traffic to finish third.

Bred in Virginia, Long On Value most recently commanded $100,000 at the Keeneland November sale. He has since won both of his starts for trainer Brad Cox, improving his overall record to nine wins from 32 starts for earnings of over $1.1 million.

For Brad Cox, it was his second straight victory in the Highlander. Last year, he won with Green Mask.

The Highlander now fronts a three-race turf series at Woodbine with the overall winning trainer earning $10,000 and the owner picking up $15,000. Points are awarded on a 10-7-5-3-2 basis for the top five finishers with other entrants getting 1 point.

The August 25 Play the King, at seven furlongs, and the October 13 Nearctic, at six furlongs, are the other races in the series. Both are Grade 2 races with the Play the King worth $175,000 and the Nearctic $250,000.

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Copyright © 2018 Paulick Report.

Virginia-bred One Go All Go, who has earned over $358,000 this year alone, will make his 8th start of 2018 in the Grade I United Nations Stakes at Monmouth on Saturday.

Virginia-bred One Go All Go wins the $400,000 Commonwealth Derby (Gr. II) in 2015 at Laurel

The 6 year old Fairbanks horse seems to be improving with age. He captured the Grade 2 Dixiana Elkhorn Stakes April 12th at Keeneland, and was runner-up in a trio of Grade 2 stakes earlier in the year — the Fort Lauderdale, Pan American and Mac Diarmida Stakes. He has also competed in a trio of Grade I events. One Go All Go was fourth in the Gulfstream Park Turf Stakes, third in the Man o’War and most recently finished 11th in the Manhattan Stakes on the Belmont Day card.

Shining Copper (inside) just edges Virginia-bred One Go All Go in the Grade 2 Fort Lauderdale Stakes. Photo by Kenny Martin.

One Go All Go was bred by Albert Coppola. He will face eight others in the United Nations, which is slated as Monmouth’s 11th.