George Washington | Superfectablog v3.0

Breeders’ Cup Saturday

Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup races should be an interesting mix of star power and unknown quantities. Anything could happen in the Marathon, the two-year-old races might produce any number of unusual results and the surface will be new to defending champion Curlin and foreign entrants alike, so the Classic is no foregone conclusion. In [...]

Tuesday Metapost

I spent much of Saturday glued to TVG (now a TBA sponsor) since the Powers That Be did not see fit to otherwise televise more than one of the eleven G1 races featured this weekend between Belmont and Santa Anita (not to mention the overseas races). Before the star performances, however, there were a [...]

King Henry

Check off another box for Henrythenavigator: running against older horses? No problem. Granted, there were only two four-year-olds in the Sussex Stakes field and they were well-beaten, but it’s another milestone for the colt. Raven’s Pass, an American-bred Elusive Quality colt (who has now finished behind Henrythenavigator three times), did press him at the [...]

Royal Ascot: Day 1

Royal Ascot opened today with a gritty win for Haradasun in the Queen Anne Stakes; although passed by two horses, he battled back at the end to claim victory. Darjina and Finsceal Beo were second and third (although both encountered traffic trouble) — and both Johnny Murtagh and Kevin Manning picked up bans for [...]

Happy New Year

2008 is here at last, and while it remains a slow news week, let’s finally get to our 2007 recap. First, we’ll revisit the biggest news stories in racing in something approaching chronological order:

Barbaro’s death: for those of us working at Penn Vet at the time, it was probably less of a shock than [...]

Live Longshots

After yesterday’s musical interlude, you’re no doubt waiting expectantly for a full race-by-race analysis. Well, with today being my last day at Penn Vet, you’ll have to wait a little bit longer. But don’t despair, today brings you some of my (hopefully) live longshots for each race.

Filly & Mare SprintWith La Traviata in [...]

Royal Ascot

Superfecta has been away tending to mending cats and wheezy toddlers, so there’s no real weekend roundup this week except to comment on the real toughness Chelokee displayed in the Northern Dancer — he looked like he was about to settle for second after Zanjero passed him, then he fought back to win. Nicely [...]

Hard Spun Is Back – Will George Washington Follow?

Hard Spun looked great in the Lane’s End — clearly his love for Polytrack was as advertised. Trainer Larry Jones put the win in perspective:
I’m not looking forward to taking on any of them, with Great Hunter, Street Sense and Any Given Saturday all sitting there, and now maybe this horse, who doesn’t really [...]

More Coolmore Fun

Greg Wood’s article in The Guardian (or The Grauniad, if you prefer) sums up the whole George Washington/Holy Roman Emperor affair very well indeed:
Whatever gloss they try to put on it – and Coolmore does gloss like no one else – this can be no more than a damage-limitation exercise. And if it makes business [...]

Any Danehill Will Do

Somewhat overshadowing Circular Quay’s nice victory in the Louisiana Derby (at least in Europe) was the rather unexpected news that George Washington is (apparently) infertile and so three-year-old Holy Roman Emperor has been abruptly retired to deputize for him.

It seems there was more than a little dismay from trainer Aidan OBrien:
Holy Roman Emperor was our [...]

Racehorses in History

Sponsors

Raceday 360

Labels