Chris McGrath | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: If You Can Run, You Won’t Have to Hide

“When you figure it out, let me know.”

Those were the parting words of a highly esteemed breeder this week, after we exchanged a few thoughts on the diminishing viability of stallions once they have covered their first book of mares. Not that “diminishing,” as an adjective, is really equal to the case. I suppose you could diminish down a lift shaft, but it wouldn’t be the first word that would occur to you in the time available.

Spoiler alert: I haven’t figured it out. But I think I know where we might start.

We all know that most stallions never earn a fee higher than their opening one; and that things are nowadays getting tough even for stallions entering their second year. Such is the nervousness of commercial breeders about taking a yearling to market once its sire has been exposed even to the (highly unimaginative) judgement of the sales ring; never mind about sticking around long enough to see whether the stock can actually run.

Many farms have duly sought to incentivize loyalty to new stallions. Breed your mare to such-and-such a horse for his first two years, for instance, and you can come back gratis ever after. Of course, there’s a pretty bleak inference. By the time you get free access, many stallions may have reached a point where you would rather pay to go elsewhere anyway.

The woman who contacted me this week suggested that farms might extend the logic behind such schemes precisely to those stallions who are now going “cold.” Cutting their fees, she remarked, always feels like a kick in the teeth to those who supported them the previous year. Say you paid $30,000 for the foal in your mare’s belly; and now, even before its delivery, the same sire is down to $20,000. That puts a red flag over your foal straightaway, and will hardly encourage you to double down with a return cover.

Perhaps, then, farms could play nice with my breeder by going back to her and saying: “Look, we’re sorry about devaluing your investment in our horse. You believed in him, after all–and we still do. So we’d like to invite you back. If you’re prepared to persevere with him for 2021, at his new fee of $20,000, we’ll backdate that rate to this pregnancy as well.”

The farm would only get $40,000 for two covers, instead of the $50,000 due at the prevailing rates. But that’s still a whole lot better than $30,000 for one cover, plus zilch for the next year as the disgruntled breeder seeks sanctuary in some random freshman. In theory, remember, fee cuts are only made in the hope of encouraging custom–but how often do they achieve precisely the reverse effect?

Daredevil | Louise Reinagel

Even this kind of inventive concession might not be enough for breeders to whom any savings on fee may seem relatively marginal, relative to the depreciation invited by that red flag. But the farm, in that case, would still get to trouser its $30,000.

If farm and breeder can meet in the middle, however, the “cooling” stallion might yet be able to stay in the game a little longer; long enough, perhaps, to earn a more realistic assessment than is typically made of a single crop of juveniles, often by a stallion who only earned his place at stud by thriving with maturity round a second turn. And that, in turn, might even reduce the frequency with which farms cut their losses and sell a stallion overseas or into a regional program–which is akin to sticking that red flag right under the tail of your poor yearling.

Regardless of whether this suggestion would be practicable, or effective, the key is that stallion farms and breeders work together to break the vicious cycle devaluing the commodities traded by both. Because while their mutual arrangements ultimately only determine “supply,” both might enjoy greater security if the “demand” were better educated.

Gradually I am beginning to grasp how farms and breeders alike feel pretty helpless about the overloading of new stallions. Certainly the farm accountants would like nothing better than business balanced through the roster. As it is, everyone is at the mercy of the purchasers. Because it’s the guy sticking a hand up at ringside who really needs to put a premium on the horse bred to run, as opposed to the one produced merely to look the part on the rostrum.

There are two big problems in current purchasing behavior. One is that so much of it is driven by pinhooks: yet another commercial cycle, in other words, dividing the planning of a mating from the aspiration to win races. The other is that the professionals guiding end-users–veterinarians, agents and so on–are directing traffic to the show ponies. In some cases, okay, they simply want to avoid appearing at fault for any structural defects that may emerge later. In others, however, they are taking out a less pardonable insurance.

If they were trying to provide a real service for their patrons, they would buy or breed a horse by, for instance, the perennially under-rated Lookin At Lucky. But they don’t want to say: “Just look, sir/madam, at the fantastic value I have secured. I can only do that for you because everyone else is too dumb, or too scared, to risk walking back through the herd.” Instead they steer the action to stallion X, saying: “Don’t blame ME if this goes wrong. Because you can see the whole community of experts just loves this guy.”

And the commercial consensus can barely be dignified as “fashion,” which might at least last a year. Increasingly, they are mere fads. One of the main reasons why the big farms throw such numbers at their new sires is because a single headliner will serve as a fig leaf to the modesty of literally hundreds of other foals. A stallion’s entire career can hinge on a single member of his first crop. Horse A lands on a weak Grade I, with the right pace or track bias, and daddy is made. Horse B may be a street better, but he gets injured schooling in the gate and doesn’t run until he’s four. By then, the die is cast.

A couple of days ago we looked at the story, virtually the parable, of Daredevil–who was down to 21 mares when sold to Turkey after a quiet start by his first juveniles. Clearly, however, it’s extremely rare for such horses to leave behind an adequately stinging rebuke to earn a passage back home.

Sky Mesa | EquiSport Photos

The buyers may well retort that it’s not easy to find stallions like Lookin At Lucky. Most “proven” sires are, deservedly, also expensive ones. If there just aren’t that many around who reliably get you a runner at an accessible price, then the best you can do is take a punt on a new stallion–and hope that you have stumbled across the next Constitution, or Not This Time, or whoever.

But I can’t have that. Throw the same cavalry of mares favoring the rookies at many of those slugging away at that level between The Factor and Midshipman, say, taking in your Midnight Lutes and Sky Mesas and Mizzen Masts and so on, and do you seriously think your stakes ratio would be–well, “diminished”? Apart from anything else, moreover, why not take the same gamble at slashed fees on the many Classic-oriented stallions who haven’t really had a chance to establish their merit or otherwise, in their fourth or fifth seasons at stud?

To improve supply, we have to improve demand. We shouldn’t be dragging the spenders, the guys who come to the professionals for guidance, into our fitful, fretful, flighty pursuit of the quick buck. Do the right thing by the fellows with the dough, after all, and we’ll also end up doing the right thing by the breed. And, ultimately, we’ll make the whole business more sustainable.

In Britain, where prize money is notoriously inadequate relative to the cost of participation, they strive to fill the gap with heritage and pageant and the associated prestige. By the same token, if American horsemen want to sustain investment–in training fees, especially, which keep piling up even as your gamble on a freshman sire rapidly “diminishes” through the claiming grades–then they must work, above all, at the experience of ownership.

If the whole adventure can be made glamorous and fun and compelling, something that people of all classes will want to share with their friends (and vaunt to their enemies!), whether at Saratoga or Finger Lakes, then who knows? Maybe they might want to buy actual runners, rather than throw all their money at our oil-strike fantasies about a home run in the sales ring.

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This Side Up: Cutting Down Scepticism on Fees

Bought yourself a mare in Lexington this week? Good for you. You have kept the faith. In many cases, that will be because you have seen it all before: you’ve ridden out bumps in the economy, and eked out value from these stoical and enduring creatures by borrowing their impassive engagement with the patient rhythms of Nature. It’s a long game, after all, one that will absorb pandemics and presidential cycles like a passing April shower.

But even the longest journey starts with a single step. And many of you will already have had an assignation in mind for your new mare from the moment you first folded down the catalogue page.

As we know, the stallion farms have done their bit to animate a market stricken by anxiety about the current strain on the global economic system. All the big commercial operations have made headline cuts in fees for 2021, and I’m already salivating over some of the value to be identified in our annual winter appraisal of the stallion market.

Some people, however, have muttered their scepticism as to the substance of these gestures. Has there really been a comprehensive remodelling in the base cost of breeding a Thoroughbred? Or have farms merely camouflaged the decline they had invited in overpricing particular types of stallion?

Well, I thought that might be worth investigating. Intake by intake, I’ve taken a look at the relative decline, between stallions at different stages of their careers, at 12 leading farms in Kentucky. We know, after all, that few sires ever again command a fee as high as their opening one; and that they will generally take repeated trims until either discarded, or achieving something to suggest a long-term viability.

How much deeper than “normal”, then, were the cuts this time round? And where were they concentrated?

This table charts the decline, in each of the past two years, in the aggregate stud fees charged by sires at the same stage of their careers on these 12 farms.

It’s a broad-brush exercise, very soon complicated by stallion traffic in and out of the Bluegrass by the likes of California Chrome (out), Laoban (in) and Daredevil (out and in). But my feeling is that when these farm owners talk about us all being in this together, they could also be addressing their stallions. Because they do, in the round, appear to have led sires young and old out onto the high road to meet the breeders halfway.

If there is divergence in the angle of the knife making these cuts, then it’s not so much between stallions at a different stage as between stallions on different farms. And you won’t find it hard to decide which were in deadly earnest, and which were pretty much making standard business decisions about individual stallions who would have been in trouble anyway.

Authentic–priced at $75,000–is the most expensive of the 2021 intake of new stallions to date | Breeders’ Cup/Eclipse Sportswire

New stallions for 2021 vs. in 2020

I suspect that the one and only group of stallions that are being protected, as a class, will turn out to be those making their entrance to the market. These, presumably, are again guaranteed books of grotesque size; certainly a lot of them appear to have been priced that way.

But there’s no point comparing their fees with those who started last spring, as every intake varies in commercial appeal: a $150,000 tag for Justify, for instance, helped to elevate the aggregate fee value of those who started at these 12 farms in 2019 at $480,000, compared with $262,500 for those who began earlier this year. The point here is to compare the relative loss of value suffered, by each intake, at the equivalent point of their careers.

And that’s certainly instructive in the case of those who entered stud in 2020, whose first foals will be delivered in the new year. Collectively, the sampled farms send these stallions back to market in 2021 at an aggregate fee cost of $220,000, down 16.2% from the $262,500 they collectively charged in their debut season.

This is a major departure from the way studs have sought to maintain values at least until a first crop of weanlings has entered the ring. In 2020, by contrast, the same farms were able to charge $477,500 for sires entering a second season, virtually unchanged from an opening $480,000.

This time around, even the stars have been repriced–most strikingly at Spendthrift. A mare apiece to Omaha Beach, Vino Rosso and Mitole would have cost a total of $100,000 last spring; now you can get to them all for $75,000.

Sires with first-crop yearlings in 2021

The next group, meanwhile, is now reaching the stage–with their first yearlings about to go into the ring–when commercial breeders typically abscond to the next round of cadets, and books start to erode. This year, sires who entered stud in 2018 were charging $270,000 from $247,500, down 8.3%, with five of 13 taking cuts. But the group who entered stud in 2019 will be charging $382,500 from $477,500, down no less than 19.9% on their last set of fees. Only four of 19 stallions in this group have managed to hold their 2020 fees.

The Factor is an example of a sire whose fee has held | Lee Thomas

Fourth-year (and beyond) stallions

Next we reach a group that tends to cause breeders really to back off, unless their first yearlings have enjoyed a conspicuous market vogue. Because in his fourth year we start to learn whether a stallion’s first juveniles can actually run.

The sires who entered stud in 2017 duly eased their 2020 fees by 10.2%, from $317,500 to $285,000, albeit the majority of farms actually held their nerve and their prices. Those who entered stud in 2018, however, will be taking the equivalent step in the new year at $191,000, down fully 22.8% from $247,500.

Hereafter comparisons become harder. This is the crossroads of every stallion’s career, with the whims of the market now measurable against results on the track. So you’ll have one guy packing his bags for Turkey even as the next turns out to be Constitution, upgraded to $40,000 and now $85,000. In terms of aggregate fees, then, the winners will very often redeem the damage done by the losers. For present purposes, the flux is such that it is more instructive to assess those who come out the other side of this winnowing process.

For instance, the handful still on these farms with three crops of runners (entered stud 2015) are certainly sharing the pain. The bare half-dozen still in business will be charging $67,500 between them in 2021, compared with $85,000 in 2020 and $125,000 the year before.

Consolidation, already so difficult because of the commercial infatuation with unproven sires, is becoming harder and harder. Move on a couple of intakes, to those with a fifth crop of runners (entered stud 2013), and it speaks volumes for The Factor, say, that he can hold even a fee he has already outpunched when a studmate as accomplished as Union Rags must take a cut of no less than 50%.

With exceptions, even stalwarts like Tapit have seen cuts going into 2021 | EquiSport Photos

Benchmark sires

And what of those who set the standard; the happy few who, having established their merit and viability, represent the model for those still trying to make a name for themselves? Operating at all levels of the market, from War Front to plucky achievers like Midshipman, they comprise the solid foundation for the whole stallion industry.

Sure enough, after a long bull run in the bloodstock market, these older sires (a total of 35 across our 12 chosen farms) collectively maintained their covering value in 2020 at $2,280,000, up marginally from $2,225,000 the previous year. For 2021, however, despite the odd hike (Into Mischief, Uncle Mo, Speightstown and Munnings) they have slipped 8.2% to $2,041,500.

That’s just about half the percentage loss, then, of those embarking on their second season. Normally, these are the two stable bookends to all the fluctuations in between. But even this lesser erosion implies some exceptional opportunity among the kind of proven sires who can make a mare, who can build a family, pending any return to the mechanical commercial exploitation of unproven sires.

I do see, nowadays, how that kind of thing is primarily driven by breeders; and I no longer blame the farms for loading the books of new stallions when the resulting stock will be given such a brief window of opportunity on the track. At the best of times, farm accountants have a terribly difficult balancing act. And, in reacting to the present crisis, it looks as though that balance extends at least to their collective use of the scythe. Admittedly, you’ll find that the cuts may be a little more jagged on some rosters than others. But the overall result is that there is opportunity across the herd.

So if you do insist on using a newcomer, with such luminous value across the rest of the spectrum, then good luck in your incorrigibility. Because if the overall “supply” did need some kind of correction, then so too, unmistakably, does our demand.

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This Side Up: A Coup d’Etat to Benefit Us All

In these days of wilful division and reluctant separation, perhaps the wider world could for once learn something from our own community. For while our preoccupations may be frivolous, relative to such momentous challenges as the securing of democracy or public health, they do at least inculcate precisely the kind of calm forbearance most needed, right now, to quell the hysteria and despair infecting national wellbeing.

It’s pouring with rain? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. Middle of a heatwave? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. The trough has frozen to the depth of your fist? Go feed your horse and clean out the stall. You have no choice; and you have no guarantees. How often does it happen that your reward, for all your dependability and patience and exertion, is a split-second that instantly unravels daily increments of endeavor amounting to months, seasons, years? Yet still we persevere, ever animated by faith in what we are doing; faith in our horses. Or, if not faith, at least hope. And it just feels like a lot of people out there could do with a little more of that.

Even the Breeders’ Cup, the game-changing innovation of the modern industry, is now into its 37th cycle. And if the differences in the experience this year could scarcely be less welcome, the host city and its racetrack have banked enough Turf history to absorb even the bleakest addition to precedent. If the stands loom emptily over the stretch, they still teem with the glad spectres of horsemen and women past–whose lore, whose length of perspective, has seeped into the Bluegrass generation by generation, as gradual as the dew laid through cold hours of darkness to offer a sparkling welcome to a new day.

Because we know that dawn will come. It will bring fresh challenges, no doubt, as well as fresh hope. But the sun will rise in the same place, to the same clatter of buckets, the same impatient nickering.

That’s why there could be no more fitting winner of the American sport’s richest prize than Tom’s d’Etat (Smart Strike). Especially if he could be preceded to the winner’s enclosure by Starship Jubilee (Indy Wind), or Whitmore (Pleasantly Perfect), or another from a handful of runners foaled in 2013. For these are living monuments to the shared resilience of the Thoroughbred and its custodians; and, whatever happens here, the light they have collectively shed on this gloomiest of years has already shown us how to keep the faith.

It is five years and one day since Whitmore won by seven lengths on debut at Churchill. Before discovering his true vocation as a sprinter, he proceeded to finish last in the GI Kentucky Derby. And some of those ahead of him, from winner Nyquist (Uncle Mo) to seventh Brody’s Cause (Giant’s Causeway) and 14th Outwork (Uncle Mo), were represented on Friday’s juvenile program by first foals.

Whitmore at Keeneland | Coady

That’s not an option available to Whitmore, whose castration means that Ron Moquett, having maintained his enthusiasm with such skill, may yet eke out a fifth start in the GI B.C. Sprint at Del Mar next year. Tom’s d’Etat, however, will very soon discover just what he has been missing when he retires to WinStar–a farm with a remarkable stake in the GI Longines BC Classic.

Losing Pioneerof the Nile just as he was entering his pomp was all the more unfortunate given the ageing profile, at that point, of its other elite stallions. But WinStar is regenerating with purpose and, even while joining other farms in a series of pragmatic cuts for 2021, has been able to more than double Constitution’s fee to $85,000. If his son Tiz the Law happens to win the Classic, then the guys at WinStar may be almost as pleased as Coolmore, who will someday be welcoming him to Ashford.

WinStar is further represented, moreover, by Improbable (City Zip) and Global Campaign (Curlin). Given the sad news this week about Sagamore Farm, his co-owners, it would be especially poignant if Global Campaign were to outrun his odds as I expect.

My pick, however, remains Tom’s d’Etat–and not merely on grounds of sentiment. After stumbling out of the gate in the GI Whitney S., he was stuck behind petrified fractions (:25.12 and :49.74) and did well even to close for third to Improbable. Feeding off splits of :22.90 and :46.09 at Oaklawn in the spring, however, he had cut down the same rival decisively. That performance showed how well this horse operates off a break, and he has been duly freshened by a trainer who has been working back from this assignment all year. It was in a Grade II round here last fall, moreover, that Tom’s d’Etat announced his belated coming of age: the only Keeneland stakes success in this field.

The one pity is that Al Stall, Jr., having been ungraciously cast as the villain when Blame (Arch) spoiled the immaculate record of Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}), would find himself saluted with even less acclaim this time round. Whatever happens, he deserves immense credit for so patiently bringing Tom’s d’Etat to his full potential after just seven races across his first four years in training.

Global Campaign | Horsephotos

In fairness, the horse has become very sound with maturity and–from the final crop of a sire of sires, and with his second dam a sister to none other than Candy Ride (Arg)–looks an extremely attractive stud prospect. At WinStar, after all, he will be joining another stallion who has bucked the general trend by advancing his fee to $90,000 from $70,000. And Speightstown, who didn’t retire until he was six, is now rising 23.

So patience, once again: our perennial watchword. Seven starts across four seasons will have encompassed an awful lot of mornings–rainy, sunny, foggy, snowy–when his manger has been filled, his bedding changed, with no gallop. And that’s before we wind back to his pre-training, with Frank and Daphne Wooten; his preparation for the sales, just down the road from Keeneland at Hunter Valley Farm; never mind to the original drawing board of breeders SF Bloodstock.

Unlike Whitmore, Tom’s d’Etat won’t be racing into a third presidential term. But all these venerable animals reprove us that even the Classic racehorse is only an adolescent. A few years ago, researchers studied 274 American Thoroughbreds and established their average peak at 4.45 years.

Some benighted farms, no doubt, would be nervous of starting a stallion at eight. But since they tend to give up on most sires by the time they reach that age anyway, it’s hard to see the rush. Far better, surely, to give them a chance to demonstrate the kind of genetic attributes we should want to replicate in the breed.

So patience, everybody. Go feed your horse. And keep hoping.

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This Side Up: Breeders’ Cup Hits Pay Dirt at a Mile

Less is more, they say. Don’t worry, that’s not a facetious observation on the counting of votes. It’s just that some of us still feel that the expansion of the Breeders’ Cup into a second day, in 2007, somewhat diluted its trademark intensity.

A couple of years previously they had faced a similar calculation, in Britain, about adding a fourth day to the Cheltenham Festival: would the guarantee of another lucrative full house, at this phenomenally popular climax of the jumps season, represent a legitimate trade-off for the inevitable erosion of quality? Purists said no; the accountants said yes. You can guess whose reckoning proved decisive.

The one thing to avoid, in both cases, was to give the best horses any excuse to avoid each other. Partly to that end, no doubt, the Breeders’ Cup focused much of its innovation on grass. This can be viewed in two ways. On the one hand, the series duly embraced a discipline that has meanwhile continued to thrive domestically. At the same time, however, it offered European horsemen a pretext for renouncing the spirit of adventure that had produced so many unforgettable moments on the main track.

It so happened that the first two-day meeting was also the one that left such a deep scar on the European psyche, through the grotesque loss of George Washington (Ire) (Danehill) in the Monmouth slop. If that experience heightened appetite for the synthetics experiment, then the staging of the next Breeders’ Cup on such a surface, at Santa Anita, had quite the reverse effect on indigenous horsemen. Suddenly the Europeans were being invited to make hay not only in a bunch of new grass events, but in “dirt” races that were barely less congenial.

One way or another, there has clearly been a retrenchment since. That’s a topic for another day. What I’d like to address instead is the impressive way in which one particular race–the Big Ass Fans Dirt Mile–has evolved since two of its first three editions were staged, paradoxically enough, on something so akin to turf.

Back then, it felt like a consolation prize for horses on the periphery of the elite. As we approach the 14th running, however, it has matured into a bona fide Grade I with a promising record, already, of producing stallions. On Saturday, indeed, Mr. Money (Goldencents) and Rushie (Liam’s Map), will both line up as sons of past winners now doing well at stud.

Spun to Run wired the 2019 Dirt Mile | Breeders’ Cup/Eclipse Sportswire

Only this week it was announced that last year’s winner Spun to Run (Hard Spun) will stand at Gainesway in 2021, connections’ perseverance at four having unfortunately backfired with an idle campaign. The same farm already hosts 2012 winner Tapizar (Tapit). In between, dual scorer Goldencents (Into Mischief), Liam’s Map (Unbridled’s Song), Tamarkuz (Speightstown) and City of Light (Quality Road) all claimed a place at stud with a common air of validity. Some of the horses they beat, moreover, powerfully elaborated their eligibility in other races. Tamarkuz was chased home by none other than Gun Runner (Candy Ride {Arg}) and Accelerate (Lookin At Lucky); while last year Spun to Run gave the slip to the stellar Omaha Beach (War Front).

For what remains a young race, that’s a pretty formidable array of graduates. By the same token, it remains early days for most. But last year’s runner-up and the 2018 winner, for instance, both looked worth every cent of opening fees as high as $45,000 and $40,000, respectively.

Yes, you could argue that they devalued other races by taking on lesser animals in this one. Had Omaha Beach instead been obliged to square up to Mitole (Eskendereya) in the Sprint, and City of Light to Accelerate in the Classic, both those championships would have gained depth. By that point in their respective careers, however, both had discovered an optimal theatre for their brilliance. It felt right that they should be granted a platform to showcase their brand. In rejecting bigger purses to run for $1 million, after all, connections make that trade in prestige with their eyes open.

The miler, of course, has long enjoyed a premium as a stud prospect. In theory, he strikes a happy medium between sprint speed and the attributes associated with the Classic Thoroughbred. My own view, admittedly, is that such an equilibrium is most truly achieved round a single turn, without the breathing space available when you spend half the race adjusting for bends. That’s why the GI Metropolitan H. has such a storied record in announcing sires whose stock can carry their speed.

To be a true championship, drawing upon the best of both the sprinter and the two-turn horse, the Dirt Mile should really be a seamless, sweeping stampede that permits no hiding place. Nowadays, unfortunately, very few top tracks offer a “flat” mile on dirt. Hollywood Park and Arlington are out of the game, for different reasons, while the Breeders’ Cup right now seems more likely to be staged at Finger Lakes than New York’s city tracks. That leaves us only Churchill, among regular venues, though perhaps Laurel will include its “proper” mile in any prospectus for 2023.

Complexity | Sarah Andrew

Unfortunately, the hosts this year are obliged to compress the Dirt Mile into a configuration that flings the field straight into the clubhouse turn and, while gaining 70 yards, moves the winning post back to the sixteenth pole.

In 2015, Liam’s Map–despite having made his reputation that summer with those thrilling attacks from the front at Saratoga–had so much in hand that he could drop onto the rail before switching into the stretch to reel in Lea (First Samurai) at his leisure. But a more contentious field will probably make the draw a much bigger factor this time.

Though we must salute what he did round a single turn in the GII Kelso H., stall 10 will surely make things a little, well, complicated for favorite Complexity (Maclean’s Music). Conversely Art Collector (Bernardini) will have least ground to cover, if getting the necessary breaks. And while the setback that cost him a place in the GI Kentucky Derby appeared to tell in a flat GI Preakness effort, let’s not forget how he had thrashed the winner on his last visit here.

Certainly Art Collector has the pedigree to consolidate the Dirt Mile’s growing status as springboard to a stud career. He will be the hometown hope, of course, as was his dam–bred from a mare Bruce Lunsford had acquired to access a noble Greentree family–when closing to within a length in the 2011 GI Filly and Mare Turf at Churchill.

It was Lunsford, remember, who gave Mitch McConnell such a fright in their 2008 Senate race. He finds the politics of today depressingly negative and funding-driven. But he retained his optimism, when we spoke during the summer, and loves the fellowship of the Turf. So while many people this week find themselves standing apart for reasons other than contagion, let’s hope that all Kentucky–united by their esteem for his trainer, jockey and owner-breeder–can come together and root for Art Collector.

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