Racing Record
Skip Away won one of six starts as a two-year-old, placing in the Cowdin and Remsen Stakes at Belmont Park. His first stakes win came as a three-year-old, when he defeated eventual Preakness Stakes winner Louis Quatorze by six lengths in the Blue Grass Stakes while setting a new stakes record over a wet-fast track at Keeneland Race Course.
After an unaccountably poor performance in the Kentucky Derby, Skip Away finished second in both the Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes, losing the latter by a length to Editor's Note after a prolonged duel down the long stretch. He won the 1996 Haskell Invitational Handicap and in October of that year, he defeated Cigar, winner of 17 of his previous 18 races, in the Jockey Club Gold Cup at Belmont Park. Seizing the lead entering the stretch, Skip Away won by a head over the steadily closing champion.
Formal Gold defeated Skip Away in four of their six meetings in 1997. After Skip Away was soundly defeated as a four-year-old by Formal Gold in the Philip H. Iselin Breeders' Cup Handicap at Monmouth Park and in the Woodward Stakes at Belmont Park, he was given a new rider, Jerry Bailey, who replaced Shane Sellers. With Bailey at the reins, Skip Away adopted a new front-running style and won nine consecutive races, including a six-length victory in the 1997 Breeders' Cup Classic, contested that year at Hollywood Park Racetrack, setting a record time of 1:59:16 under another new rider, Mike Smith.
As a five-year-old, Skip Away won seven consecutive races including five Grade I events, such as the 1998 Pimlico Special, Hollywood Gold Cup, and Woodward Stakes. Although he failed to repeat his Breeders' Cup win at Churchill Downs, he was voted the Eclipse Award as both Champion Handicap Horse and Horse of the Year for 1998. He was retired to stud that fall with 18 wins and 34 in-the-money finishes from 38 career starts and earnings of $9,616,360.
Read more about this topic: Skip Away
Famous quotes containing the words racing and/or record:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)