After buying her first horse 10 years earlier, Ellen Charles turned to savvy auction buys to stock her increasingly successful Hillwood Stable. Among her 2010 purchases was a $380,000 2-year-old daughter of Quiet American named Buffgirl, the second highest-priced filly at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic May sale.
In celebration of the Maryland Hunt Cup’s 100th running, the steeplechase community reflected on the world’s greatest race over timber fences and its legendary winners. Wrote Peter Winants: “. . . tradition, leadership, consistency and courage are still integral characteristics of the great race.”
Famed Chesapeake City, Md., breeder Allaire duPont decided, reluctantly, to liquidate part of her foal crop, and set up a three-year agreement with Virginian L. Clay Camp, who would pay cash for half of that year’s weanlings, prep them at his Glenmore Farm near Keswick, and sell at Saratoga the following summer.
Racing in Maryland returned to a degree of normalcy after track shutdowns during World War II. But racing writer Don Reed noted: “It would be ostrich-like, indeed, to say that racing resumes full scale in Maryland on the same basis which this sort of operation ended back in 1942. Too much has happened in that period to warrant ever referring to the sport ‘as the same.’ During the wartime period and the era just following it, Maryland’s sport has both prospered and been condemned.”
Virginia-bred Quality Road led the list of money-earners in the region with $1.26 million in 2010, and was one of nine stakes winners that year bred by Edward P. “Ned” Evans, who died Dec. 31 at age 68. Evans bred more than 100 stakes winners, including Breeders’ Cup Classic-G1 winner and Horse of the Year Saint Liam (a Kentucky-bred). For four decades top-quality runners were produced at Evans’ Spring Hill Farm in Casanova, Va. He ranked among the top 10 breeders in North America for more than a decade and was the TOBA National Breeder of the Year in 2009.
It seemed that change was on the horizon for Maryland racing as House Bill 1380, legislation aimed to provide coin-operated slot machines at the state’s mile Thoroughbred tracks (Laurel and Pimlico) and the Standardbred track Rosecroft Raceway, was introduced into the Maryland legislature in late February.
In his first couple months as a trainer, Charles T. Jones had seven wins from 15 starts, two of them stakes with the 4-year-old filly Daring Step. The daughter of Prince Dare won five straight, including Liberty Bell’s Tuscarora and Bowie’s Conniver handicaps.
Knockdown and Adroit were bright lights for Maryland’s breeding program, with stakes wins in California and Florida, respectively.
