The Washington Park Handicap is an American Thoroughbred horse race held annually during the first week of September at Arlington Park Racetrack in Arlington Heights, Illinois. A Grade III event open to horses age three and older, it is contested on Polytrack synthetic dirt over a distance of a mile and three-sixteenths (9.5 furlongs). The race is designed to be a prep for the Breeders' Cup Classic.
Inaugurated at the now defunct Washington Park Race Track, in 1958 it was moved to Arlington Park. In 1978 and 1979 it was contested on turf.
In 1935 the race was run as the Washington Park Championship Stakes and from 1980 through 1985 as the Washington Park Stakes.
Since inception, the race has been contersted at various distances:
- 6 furlongs : 1927-1934, 1938;
- 1 mile : 1951-1958, 1960–1962, 1965–1972;
- 1⅛ miles : 1939, 1959, 1963–1964, 1975–1977, 1980–1987, 1989–1997, 2000;
- 1³/ miles : 1978-1979 (on turf), 2002–present;
- 1¼ : 1926, 1935–36, 1940–1950, 1973–74, 2001.
Famous quotes containing the words washington, park and/or handicap:
“The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibility—and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying ... it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“Linnæus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his “comb” and “spare shirt,” “leathern breeches” and “gauze cap to keep off gnats,” with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)