"I went to Yaddo twice, once in the summer for two weeks, and for several months the winter before I went to Brazil. Mrs. Ames was very much in evidence then. I didn’t like it in the summer because of the incessant coming and going, but the winter was rather different. There were only six of us, and just by luck we all liked each other and had a very good time. I wrote one poem, I think, in that whole stretch. The first time I liked the horse races, I’m afraid. In the summer—I think this still goes on—you can walk through the Whitney estate to the tracks. A friend and I used to walk there early in the morning and sit at the track and have coffee and blueberry muffins while they exercised the horses. I loved that. We went to a sale of yearlings in August and that was beautiful. The sale was in a big tent. The grooms had brass dustpans and brooms with brass handles and they’d go around after the little colts and sweep up the manure. That’s what I remember best about Yaddo."

"There was one troubling development during the course of this meet. Some NYRA officials have attempted to regulate the flow of information to and from the media ... the emergence of an intensified adversarial relationship could interfere with the readers’ need to know facts."

"Events like the Personal Ensign answer affirmatively the question whether racing is a sport. If gambling were its only attribute, the percentages and angles would be all you need to know. Like baseball, competition between Thoroughbreds has a soul which goes far beyond the most accurate numbers devised by man or machine."

"So, the bottom line is, Rachel’s defeat in the Personal Ensign, although extremely disappointing, should in the long run be looked upon as just that -- a defeat, and not as an indication that she no longer should be competing. If she shows any physical or mental signs coming out of the Personal Ensign that she has had enough, then by all means retire her. But if she is sound and that passion is still evident, there is no reason not to put the sword in her hand again and see if she can recapture the glory of last year -- at her distance."

"Jockey Maylan Studart doesn't have an agent, so instead she used Facebook to help pick up her first career win at Saratoga Race Course."

"A few days after he bought a modestly bred horse from a friend named Don Hunt, Tim Snyder took a moment to reflect. He had no money, no horse trailer to get his new acquisition to where he needed to go and a filly that had been rejected by nearly everyone else who had come in contact with her. The horse had a clubfoot, a bad shoulder, a reputation for being slow and was blind in one eye, reason enough for Snyder to second-guess what he had just done."

Jeff Scott on the direction of racing over the past decade. "Another Saratoga trend is the continued decline in the number of conditioned allowance races, particularly in open (non-statebred) events. By limiting fields to horses who have won a similar number of races ("other than maiden, claiming, starter or restricted") conditioned allowances pit horses of roughly equal accomplishment against each other, and thus are often attractive betting propositions. The number of open, conditioned allowances at Saratoga (including those run as optional claimers) decreased from 54 to 34 between 2004 and 2009. Ten years earlier, in 1999, there were 72."

"NYRA has placed a big wager on the renowned Saratoga meet this year by adding four days of races, a 10 percent expansion. The 40-day meet remains NYRA’s money-maker, and is now the longest in almost 130 years." Related: <a href="http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2010/07/02/sports/horseracing/doc4c2d71ca44631121554616.txt">Ready to gamble?</a>

"I remember one woman with four young girls who came up to my window and went through the standard routine: frazzled, sunglasses dangling from her lower lip, she flipped through the program as her daughters shouted out horses at random. 'I want the three!' one would yell, jumping up and down, and the woman would sigh and mutter, 'I guess we’ll have the three,' holding up a single crumpled bill to accompany each bet."

Traditional non-profit racing fan organization based in Saratoga

Racing's daily tabloid