By Mike Paradise After a hotter than normal June weather wise, we begin July on Friday night with the weekend opening of Hawthorne’s summer meet. With a smaller than usual warm weather session, the ICF stakes schedule had to be jammed into a less than two and one-half month stretch. A quartet of […]
By Mike Paradise The winter in between and a two-year-old horse and a three-year-old looms large in the horse racing industry. You’ve read countless times how a horse “matured” over the winter or “filled out” substantially, and that’s the reason for a more successful sophomore campaign. Of course, it doesn’t always come […]
By Mike Paradise When I was printing out of past performance lines for Friday’s and Saturday’s Springfield races, I thought something went awry with my printer. It just kept going and going and going. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the printer, it was the number of races it had […]
By Mike Paradise With a highly successful lunching of its Juneteenth Celebration race last year this season’s go around moves to Springfield and a day early because of racing being Dark on Sunday, June 19th. The inaugural Juneteenth Celebration event was the first pari-mutuel harness race in Illinois history to feature an entire […]
By Mike Paradise The road to Hawthorne’s Night of Champions in mid-September begins Friday at the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield for pacers and trotters ages three and up. It began a couple of two days ago for two-year-olds on the same racetrack when the Summer Classic unfolded for the freshman colony. […]
By Mike Paradise When the 2022 Summer Classic for ICF two-year-old horses were announced for June 15th there was no scarcity of sceptics that a shortage of horses being entered was possible because of the early date Those doubters proved to be off base, and by a wide margin. No less than […]
By Mike Paradise Triple ZZ Stable’s Kizzzmelikeumissme passed her first major sophomore test with a convincing victory in Saturday night $30,000 ICF event for three-year-old pacers. Nicely handled by the meet’s leading driver Kyle Wilfong, the John Filomeno trained home-bred used a different tactic to secure her third career victory in five starts […]