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Maggi Moss is both a winning racehorse owner, and a champion for horse welfare.

Maggi Moss stays true to horses, fights for them

The New Year was coming fast as Indian Chant barreled across the Santa Anita finish line on Dec. 31, 2006. His powerful victory brought his owner, Maggi Moss, unparalleled success. In a flash, she became the most winning racehorse owner in the United States that year, cinching a coveted spot no woman had ever held before. Not known to be faint of heart, Moss started to cry. “I was just so tired,” she recalls in a phone interview with OffTrackThoroughbreds.com. “In 2006, I worked a ton of hours, and when it was finally over, the biggest revelation I had was […]

Voler Bar Nuit, a.k.a. Fly, captures the Gamblers Choice award at Pimlico under rider Erica Gaertner.

Fly Voler fly, up, up to the sky

Erica Gaertner had 60 seconds to make her gamble pay off. Swinging lightly into the saddle of her difficult but brilliant T-bred Fly, she pointed him at the field of jumps and galloped like crazy toward the choice she had made. “Each of the 10 fences was assigned a point value. I walked the course twice first, and picked out a course of 11 or 12 jumps,” she says, noting that competitors were allowed to jump fences twice, if they chose. It was a gamble. But Gaertner and Fly (JC name: Voler Bar Nuit) were victorious in the Gambler’s Choice […]

The aftermath of a binge-eating spree after escaping his stall. Wyatt is kept in ice boots to help protect against onset of laminitis.

Bridleless Wyatt improves after binge, a Houdini

Bridleless Wyatt, known on racetracks far and wide as Donna Keen’s beautiful, “kill-pen save” who ponies racehorses without a bridle on his face, had a brush with illness last week after eating himself sick. Wyatt, who has Houdini’s knack for getting out of his stall, managed to escape last week and find his way to an unlocked feed storage room. After consuming three bags of feed—oats and two kinds of sweet feed, Wyatt lay down in the aisle of the shedrow and snoozed, and then later wandered about, checking on other horses, says Keen, who watched the episode unfold later […]