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.
Came a whisper the other day, what they call racetrack steam. Got it on good authority.
They’re plannin’ this farewell fling at Laurel Park on Oct. 23. During the Jim McKay Maryland Million, the big show they put on every fall, they’re gonna throw some kinda bash for this mare who caught a raw deal and still won like crazy. Wicked big earner. Kept the guy who owns and trained and bred her, Jerry Robb, on pins and needles five years. Gina Robb too. She and Jerry got hitched in 2017, day after Thanksgiving.
Talk Show Man. Phlash Phelps. Eighttofasttocatch. Roadhog. Admirals War Chest. Whether you bet on them, cheered for them, smiled when you spotted their names in the Maryland Million Souvenir Guide’s pages, snapped pictures as they left the winner’s circle or just simply loved them, they’re just a handful of the greats whose names ring synonymously with Jim McKay Maryland Million Day.
Sabrina and Angie Moore, the women behind Maryland’s GreenMount Farm, looked like they’d run a marathon after watching Knicks Go – a horse Angie bred and her daughter Sabrina raised – solidify his spot atop the list of the best Thoroughbreds in training in 2021 with a victory in the 94th Whitney Stakes-G1 at Saratoga Race Course Aug. 7.
Nestled between the big screen television and The Stronach Group’s tent, the historic horse and rider weathervane sits quietly atop its cupola in the Pimlico Race Course infield. Five feet wide, and made of aluminum, it’s coated in 55 years of Preakness history, paying tribute to each winner since 1966 as a replacement for the original. That iron piece lived on top of Pimlico’s clubhouse from 1909, when the tradition of painting the winning silks began, until it was damaged when the old clubhouse burned down (don’t worry, it’s in the track museum).
Michael McCarthy leaned on the fence outside the stakes barn at Pimlico Race Course. The trainer finished a Preakness Week 2021 television interview, took a break from his insistent phone and replied to a question about his runner Rombauer with a simple, “We can go see him if you want.”
Danny Lopez watched the last few strides of Chub Wagon’s latest tally, shook hands with his trainer, accepted a few congratulations and went back five decades.
On a warm autumn afternoon at Marlboro Race Track, Albert Adams climbed aboard Wandering Jim, a gelding who had won for him just the day before on the same track.
If Adams, a 16-year-old apprentice from Baltimore, was nervous, no one knew. But he certainly might have been. It was a big day, a very big day, for the teenage jockey.
