Trotting

Mike Paradise's daily notes and line will resume with the opening of the local season at Balmoral Park on Wednesday, January 28.

THERE ONCE WAS a horse race on Long Island bigger than the Kentucky Derby. It happened in 1823 and one historian wrote that it ``symbolized the onset of modern sport.'' There once was an automobile race on Long Island that outranked -- in fact, predated...

1664: The first organized sport in America, horse racing, begins when the first English Governor of New York, Richard Nicolls, establishes the Newmarket Course at Hempstead Plains, close to the present site of Roosevelt Raceway. The purpose was to...

ASIDE FROM an abiding faith in his instincts, there was nothing working in favor of the venture George Morton Levy and his brassy band of investors embarked on in 1939. The timing was wrong, the location was wrong, the industry was wrong. But with an eye...

Here is a dead horse you just can't beat: Messenger, whose ashes now lie near the driveway entrance to an estate in northern Nassau County. He lived from 1780 to 1808 -- roughly paralleling the presidency of George Washington -- and was the father of...

Messenger's great-granddaughter Lady Suffolk, known as ``the old gray mare of Long Island,'' was the first trotting superstar when harness racing was the most popular spectator sport in America. Foaled in 1833 in Smithtown -- she took her name from her...

Two years before the Kentucky Derby would appear, Pimlico was busy introducing its new three-year-old stakes race, the Preakness, in the Spring of 1873. Eight years after the Civil War, the Baltimore newspapers were carrying front-page stories about...