Cabra Park Stables

09/29/2026

🐴 Sir Barton won all three American classics in 1919, and nobody congratulated him on the Triple Crown, because there was no such thing yet.

He was foaled on 26 April 1916 at John E. Madden's Hamburg Place near Lexington, Kentucky, and sold in August 1918 to the Canadian owner J. K. L. Ross, who put him with the trainer H. Guy Bedwell.

With Johnny Loftus up he took the Kentucky Derby on 10 May 1919 by five lengths, wire to wire. The Preakness on 14 May, by four lengths over Eternal. The Belmont on 11 June, in American record time for a mile and three furlongs.

All three inside thirty-two days.

The phrase Triple Crown was not formally applied until 1950, when the Thoroughbred Racing Associations awarded him the title retroactively. Thirty-one years after the fact. He had been dead for thirteen of them.

He lost a match race to Man o' War at Kenilworth Park on 12 October 1920. He died of colic on 30 October 1937 and was buried in Douglas, Wyoming.

A horse can do the thing before anyone has invented a name for it, and just be a horse who won three races that spring.

Which horse do you think the record books have under-remembered most?

09/29/2026

09/29/2026

🐴 Ulysses S. Grant turned down ten thousand dollars for Cincinnati and would barely let another man touch him. He handed the reins to Abraham Lincoln without hesitation.

Cincinnati was a big chestnut, a son of the great racehorse Lexington, given to Grant shortly after Chattanooga. He carried Grant through the brutal Overland campaign of 1864 and on to the surrender talks at Appomattox, which means that horse stood in the yard while the war ended. Grant called him the finest horse he had ever seen, and he was not a man given to flourish.

During Lincoln's visit to Grant's headquarters at City Point in the last month of the war, the President rode Cincinnati every single day. Picture it: a tall, tired man on a tall chestnut horse, in the final weeks, on ground that had already been fought over.

Cincinnati outlived them both and died of old age on a friend's farm in Maryland.

Grant was famously guarded about what he loved. Letting Lincoln up on that horse was about as close as he came to saying something plainly.

Is there something of yours you would only lend to one particular person?