TDN Podcast

Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher joins this week's TDN Writers' Room to discuss superstar Life Is Good and his top three-year-old trainees.

Red hot jockey Irad Ortiz, Jr. joined this week's TDN Writers' Room to discuss superstar Life Is Good, plus recent suspensions and rise to the top of the game.

Yes, despite everything, life really is good.

I know that the industry press is currently saturated with the contention of attorneys, rather than racehorses. And I know that our sport, in the process, is squandering much of the cultural capital that should instead have been invested in the two compelling talents squaring up at Gulfstream Saturday. Yet perhaps one of the protagonists will not just put all these tawdry sagas aside, however briefly, but also pay a timely tribute to a mare who could get anyone interested in the game.

This week on the TDN Writers' Room, Fox Sports Executive Vice President Mike Mulvihill joins the TDN Writers' Room to discuss the exclusive deal NYRA and Fox Sports recently reached for the media rights to the GI Belmont Stakes.

Few will dispute the fact that jockeys are the iron warriors of horse racing. Physical danger is a very real part of the everyday existence of a rider, as is the continual adversity they are forced to endure and adapt (and react) to. On this edition of Let's Talk, the TDN's Christina Bossinakis and TVG's on-air analyst Gabby Gaudet talk to a trio of top jockeys about the stresses they suffer on the job.

Fastest two minutes in sport? You'll excuse us a bitter laugh here. By the time Mandaloun (Into Mischief) leaves the gate Saturday for the GIII Louisiana S., he'll be 382,968 minutes into a GI Kentucky Derby without end. And, with no sign of anyone putting their attorneys back in the holster, it's plainly going to be a while yet before we know whether Mandaloun will finally be anointed the 147th winner of a race that drives so many millions of dollars of investment in our industry.

Kentucky Representative Adam Koenig joins the TDN Writers' Room to talk about his plan to eliminate breakage. Koenig also discusses his support of the legalization of sports betting, and a tax on ADWs.

You would think the heart has enough on its plate. It literally never gets a break, not for one second, never mind a vacation. Never a morning's fishing, a bourbon after dinner. Yet somehow we have ended up charging this most vital of our organs with a second burden, figurative but scarcely less momentous, as the vessel of love.

Popular podcast host and race track announcer Jason Beem joined this week's TDN Writers' Room to discuss the highs and lows of his time in the racing world and share some of his favorite race-calling stories.

No matter what privileges or disadvantages we take into the starting gate, and no matter how many circuits we get to run, all of us ultimately pull up at the same finishing line. But it is not just that humbling reckoning, reached within days of each other, that united Billy Turner and Josephine Abercrombie.