Gallop girl switches gears, trains softly
Valerie Buck rode for the best barns and galloped some of the greatest racehorses. Sitting astride powerhouses such as Rags to Riches, Super Saver, and her personal favorite Fleet Indian, the exercise rider knew the well-bred superstars were very valuable indeed. But she knew just as well that even the ones who never hit it big were worth something. Intrinsic, undeniable value ran through all of their bloodlines, and it infuriated her to hear of a poor-performing Thoroughbred, derided as a throwaway. “These are valuable animals!” she insists. So, in 2009, Buck decided to start a new career, finding retired […]
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Second Call for Monmouth Park mounts
Laurie Condurso-Lane approaches horse-rescue work like an “insider.” The daughter of onetime breeder and jockey Anthony Condurso, Condurso-Lane believes that her understanding of track life helps her advocate for horses. And she’s been doing it since 1998. It was then that she cofounded the New Jersey chapter of ReRun, Inc., and today, as the head of thenewly formed re-homing organization, Second Call, she presses her home-court advantage, concentrating her efforts almost exclusively on helping Monmouth Park horses. Second Call, named for the racing term which describes the second mount for a jockey who is already listed for a first, aims […]
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Metro the ‘painting horse’ hits it big
To be both successful and famous in one’s own time is an achievement few artists ever experience. But what escaped the likes of van Gogh has been achieved by a scrappy ex-racehorse with bad knees. Metro Meteor, an ex-racehorse Thoroughbred first featured in Off Track Thoroughbreds.com last December, is almost famous, not for amassing close to $300,000 in earnings on the track, but for the post-modern abstracts he paints on a canvas set up in his stall. Taught to paint by his owner Ron Krajewski, a professional artist himself who concentrates on pet portraiture, Metro started making the bright, acrylic-based […]
