2013 Meet Closes with Significant Increases
Canterbury Park’s 69-day racing season, the longest since 2006, concluded on September 14 with gains in average handle and attendance. Off-track wagering, dollars bet on Canterbury races at other tracks and through internet sites, increased by 46.7 percent while average daily on-track wagering was up 4.8 percent. Average daily attendance was 6,656, a Canterbury Park […]
Charette-Hill Claims QH Title
Maybe someone will give Stacy Charette-Hill a dictionary for Christmas or another upcoming occasion appropriate for gift-giving. She sure could use one. She has simply run out of adjectives. Charette-Hill, the top quarter horse trainer in Shakopee this meet, repeatedly falls short of ways to describe what she thinks of Canterbury Park and how she would […]
Sunday Saratoga Connections
Most of the attention Sunday in the $20,000-added Cash Caravan Stakes was on defending champion Streak N Hot, Bob Morehouse winner Western Fun and a well-rested Naketa, making her first start in 13 months. That’s the fun of a 440-yard quarter horse dash, as Explosive Guns demonstrated with an explosive burst under Jorge Torres, enabling […]
2013 Derby Day Nears
Occasionally she’ll think about the race and the biggest win of her career, the stuff of warm feelings and pleasant thoughts, except for that interminable wait. “It was intense, wasn’t it though,” says Lori Keith. The subject at hand, of course, is the inaugural Mystic Lake Derby first held in 2012 and Keith’s controversial win […]
Torres Arrives in a Big Way
When Jorge Torres went to work last January for the Stacy Charette-Hill barn outside Lexington, Okla., he was biting at the bit, eager as all get out to raceride. That notion was firmly implanted, or at least the seeds, when he was a youngster, perhaps three or four, and an uncle gave him a leg up […]
Clean Sweep in Northlands
The best laid plans of mice and men – and quarter horse trainers – don’t always play out as they’re intended. And sometimes they do… just not as expected. Let’s call this one the second no contest of the night. Friday night in the richest quarter horse race in track history, the Mystic Lake Northlands Futurity, […]
14,455 Enjoy Father’s Day Card
There is nothing like horse racing for destroying a person’s spirit one instant and then restoring it a few minutes later. These are the vicissitudes of a sport that can present more ups and downs, more highs and lows, than the Wild thing at Valley Fair. You can be a dejected loser one moment and an […]
Brooks Fields Stakes on Tap
When you walk into Churchill Downs the history of its most famous race is displayed along the upper reaches of the grandstand outside the paddock, one Kentucky Derby winner after another, starting with Aristides in 1875. Thoroughbred racing is empty without its history, without the stories of its great horses, sires and broodmares, jockeys, trainers […]
