The Oak Tree Derby is a race for thoroughbred horses run at Santa Anita Park during the Oak Tree Racing Association meet each year. The Grade IIT event is open to three-year-old horses willing to race 1⅛ miles on the turf and offers a purse of $150,000.
The Oak Tree Derby was inaugurated in 1969 as the Volante Handicap, and was named for Lucky Baldwin's 1885 American Derby winner, Volante, who was rode to the finish line by jockey Isaac Burns Murphy.
In 1997 the Volante Handicap was renamed the Oak Tree Derby. It was run on the undercard of the Saturday Breeders' Cup card in 2008 and 2009.
Read more about Oak Tree Derby: Records, Winners of The Oak Tree Derby
Famous quotes containing the words oak tree, oak and/or tree:
“Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.”
—Edward Thomas (1878–1917)
“Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree seems to wait, and neither with impatience:Mthey give no thought to the little people below them whose impatience and curiosity eat them up alive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)