The first condition book for the Fall Festival at Parx Racing is out, and the purses are staggering.
Purses at Parx will average $500,000 a day during the festival, which will run Aug. 29 through Oct. 20. Last Friday, Parx added five $150,000 stakes to its schedule for the festival.
Sheldon Russell won two races at Laurel Park last weekend while accepting his first mounts since being injured in a spill on the Pimlico turf course April 25.
Russell had three mounts Friday and won a turf maiden race in his final ride of the day. He won again Sunday and in all went 2 for 13 over the weekend. His winners were trained by Niall Saville and Wayne Potts. They paid $20 and $10.80.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Jockey Michael Straight, paralyzed in a riding accident at Arlington Park in 2009, is learning how to walk again with the help of ReWalk, a bionic walking-assistance system that uses leg attachments powered by a backpack battery.
Straight, a 29-year-old Saratoga native, has taken as many as 21 steps by himself at one time with the aid of this machine, which he first started learning how to use last summer.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Reload was running with King Kreesa from the top of the stretch to the eighth pole in last month’s Forbidden Apple Stakes when all of a sudden he couldn’t keep up.
“I thought he probably bled,” trainer Shug McGaughey said.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Trainer D. Wayne Lukas said that Mr. Z, the winner of the Ohio Derby in June, remains on schedule for the Grade 1 King’s Bishop at Saratoga on Aug. 29.
Lukas said Tuesday that in hindsight, he regretted not entering Mr. Z in last Saturday’s Jim Dandy Stakes, noting that it became a four-horse field when Monmouth Park raised the Haskell Invitational’s purse to $1.75 million and lured Competitive Edge and Upstart.
Trainer David Walters had a nine-race winning streak broken last Saturday when Steel Curtain finished second at Charles Town. It was the first time Walters had been beaten since July 8.
Walters’s streak began July 10. On Saturday, he won the first and third races at Charles Town before Steel Curtain ran in the fourth. During his streak, Walters did run two horses as an entry in a race July 23, with one finishing first and the other fifth.
DEL MAR, Calif. – Dortmund, the Santa Anita Derby winner who has not run since the Preakness, had a minor setback this past week when he was cast in his stall at Del Mar and wound up bruising some ribs, Baffert said.
“We’ll have to wait a week or two, and then he should be all right,” Baffert said.
Baffert said he still is holding out hope that Dortmund could run in the Pennsylvania Derby on Sept. 19 at Parx.
DEL MAR, Calif. – American Pharoah got back to his summer home here at Del Mar on Monday night, and on Tuesday morning, Del Mar officials had a lengthy discussion with trainer Bob Baffert regarding their signature race, the $1 million Pacific Classic on Aug. 22, but American Pharoah will not race here this summer.
DEL MAR, Calif. – Om, the 3-year-old scheduled to start in Sunday’s $150,000 La Jolla Handicap at Del Mar, has been the answer to a racing trivia question for so long that trainer Dan Hendricks has embraced the colt’s quirky identity.
Name the horse who won the maiden race in which American Pharoah made his career debut in August 2014. Om won a maiden race at five furlongs by 7 1/4 lengths, with American Pharoah only fifth.
“It’s fun,” Hendricks said. “I can’t think of many more maiden races that were tougher than that one.”
