The National Thoroughbred Owner Conference kicks off with a welcome reception at the historic National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., this coming July 24, with the conference taking place July 25-27.
Michael Blowen glanced at the 1977 Sports Illustrated cover of Triple Crown champion Seattle Slew when it arrived in the mail and immediately discarded it. A horse on the cover of such a prominent magazine?
“I thought thinking of them as athletes was absurd,” he said.
Blowen, then a writer for the Boston Globe, accompanied Bob Taylor, one of his editors, to Suffolk Downs seven years later. The visit to the Massachusetts track was life-changing.
The Real Rider Cup, a charity show jumping event created by Anita Motion to benefit Thoroughbred aftercare, is bringing the racing and equestrian worlds together in Lexington, Kentucky just ahead of Fasig-Tipton’s July Sale.
This month has not been the month I had hoped it would be. I envisioned lots of field trips, making progress on Fin’s canter, and several more lessons. Instead, this was the month of appointments and worries. It has been hard not to feel down about myself due to the lack of riding, but this is all still progress, just of a different kind!
I was a freshman in high school when I fell off of my first rearing horse. The image of the mare on her hind legs in front of me, with my butt in the sand is seared into my brain: deep in the recesses, but it’s there nonetheless. I don’t remember hurting after that fall. Maybe I did but all I remember is thinking, this girl is going to fall over on top of me. She didn’t, and I don’t even remember it instilling a fear in me those following years, but here we are, over ten years later, and suddenly I’m thinking about it all the time.
