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Fiddler's Pilgrim romps like a dream horse after a long road back from cannon bone infection

A.P. Indy scion raring to go after 5 months in stall

In the visage of Fiddler’s Pilgrim is a horse that positively reeks of racing nobility. Darkly dappled and startlingly beautiful, Pilgrim grew to an eye-popping 17.2 hands in perfectly sculpted height, and tips the scales at close to 1,500 pounds. And with two racing kings in the family—A.P. Indy and Hansel—everybody expected, no, they knew that someday, he too would be a stakes horse. But as so often happens in life, and in racing, fate turned on a dime. And Pilgrim was no stakes horse. In four starts, he managed to turn in a second-place finish at Aqueduct before he […]

Irish Majesty readies for a race

Monzante fund helps retire ‘Top Bunk’ horse

After nine-year-old Grade 1 winner Monzante died folowing a low-level claimer race last month, a grassroots fundraising effort begun in his name, in his honor, to help seasoned campaigners like the once-beautiful gray meet a better end, saw its efforts come full circle in the safe-and-sound retirement of another seasoned campaigner. With money raised through the Monzante Memorial Challenge, 10-year-old seasoned campaigner Irish Majesty was retired sound after running his last race Aug. 14 at Penn National, and is now in the hands of Beverly Strauss of MidAtlantic Horse Rescue. Majesty had 101 starts and earned more than $500,000 in […]

Barkinspider had a body score of 2 out of 10 when he was found on the Louisiana roadside

Roadside-rescue colt is children’s show pony

Nobody was looking for Barkinspider the day the shockingly thin colt was collected from a Louisiana roadside like a heap of discarded trash. Just another unwanted ex-racehorse of no particular value, the petite white animal’s coat had fallen out in patches where the rain rot had gotten to it, and his eyes had dulled with a look of defeat. When horse-rescue personnel from the Lafayette Parish Animal Control led him onto a trailer to drive him to safety, he offered neither protest nor fight. It was as if the energy to hope for a better life had been drained away […]