Mike Smith Joins TDN Writers’ Room Podcast

TDN Podcast

When it comes to winning Breeders' Cup races, no rider does it better than Mike (Big Money) Smith. His 27 wins leads all jockeys and is seven wins better than runner-up John Velazquez. With the Breeders' Cup quickly approaching, Smith sat down with the team at the TDN Writers' Room Podcast presented by Keeneland and took us on a trip down memory lane. Smith was this week's Guest of the Week.

Of the 27 wins, is one his favorite?

“It would have to be Zenyatta (in the 2009 Classic),” he said. “That was a day that I think even other trainers that had horses in the race were rooting for her. It was crazy. It was just one of those special things. She was that good.”

In our breeding spotlight section we took a look at the WinStar stallion Timberlake.

Elsewhere on the podcast, which is also sponsored by the Pennsylvania Horse Breeders' Association, West Point Thoroughbreds, WinStar, XBTV.com, Darley America and 1/ST Racing, the team of Randy Moss, Zoe Cadman and Bill Finley congratulated Irad Ortiz Jr. on his 4,000th win, but predicted he will come nowhere lose to breaking the record set by Russell Baze, who has 12,842 career wins. The reason is that there is much less racing now than there was in Baze's heyday. The panel also brought up the fact that the GI Queen Elizabeth II S. and the GII Sands Point S., both races on the turf for 3-year-old fillies, were run on the same day. With the foal crop as low as it is, getting big fields for stakes races grows harder by the year.