Susan Salk
Brave OTTB rides from Calif. to Ala.; indomitable
The chips were already stacked against Ray’s Storm before he entered the post parade at the California track. Then his luck got dramatically worse. As the gate sprang open, another horse slammed into him, hard. He stumbled. He appeared to almost to fall. But rather than quit, like so many horses might have, Ray’s Storm dug deep and fired his “back burners,” recalls Maureen McKenzie. And just about a minute later the racehorse who’d been a bettor’s long shot that day rocketed across the finish line in first place, winning a little money, and a lifetime place in the heart of an instant fan. It […]
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A $10 bid saves her ‘horse of a lifetime’
Bidding was lackluster on the October afternoon that Sondra Fallon topped the meat buyer by $10 to buy a scrawny, cribbing, miserable little horse. “Why would anybody want her? She was skinny and miserable, and she was cribbing,” Fallon says. “The only time she didn’t crib was when she was being ridden. She was the opposite of what I was looking for too.” But, after searching up and down the aisles of the Unadilla Auction’s big fall sale in New York three years ago, ruling out horse after horse for her newly started lesson program at her barn, Fallon kept […]
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‘Race industry needs to take care of its horses’
Days before Triple Crown hopeful American Pharoah was set to blast off from post-position 5 at Belmont Park, an award-winning jockey turned sportscaster, and nicknamed for a Russian fighter jet, spoke of the need in the horse world and racing industry to take care of its equine athletes. Richard “The Mig” Migliore, an Eclipse Award winning jockey who tenaciously piloted horses to close to 4,500 wins in a storied career, says that horses brought him “everything good in my life” and now that he is retired from horse racing, he seeks to “pay them back” from his vantage on the […]
