Highest priced claiming race NYRA
 

Hopefully someone with either a really good memory or old database can help me on this, but I'm trying to find out when NYRA ran a race with a 200k or so claiming price, I think they've only done this once & it was probably 25 years or so ago give or take. I think the winner of the race was named Turkey something and up until this evening I was 100% sure I remembered the whole name accurately, but turns out my 100% memory is just as good as my 100% locks at the track :bang:

Hollywood Park ran a $1,000,000 claimer in the mid '80's. There were no claims.

That's an impressive tag.


If anyone cares, my memory finally kicked in - Turkey Point was the winner of the race I was trying to figure out, in for 200k at Aqueduct in 1991. Also no claims.

Interesting that the race was November 18 and all the starters had run already in November except 1 and he was still off less than a month.

In the early 1980s NYRA had such a claiming race for around $200,000 claiming price.


Trainer Robert DeBonis claimed the winning horse out of that race for that amount. I don't know the name of the horse but it was trained by Woody Stephens.

It's fun to go back & see these older charts, but I have some serious questions about some of the accuracy in the data. I think the WPS pool totals must have been converted to Yen or something

I would bet those pools counted OTB, probably legit.

He's talking about the $17 million WPS figure:-)

Yeah, that one is wrong:D

I find it interesting the purse was $35K. I have seen some much lower statebred claimers run for that much.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator $35k in 1981 is equivalent to $105, 234 in 2021 Dollars.

Also-ran Hodges Bay won the $1 million Canadian International a couple of years earlier, so that was a drop off for him. Only time he started for a tag and then switched over to hurdles the rest of his career.

Ah I missed that one LOL.

In the old days they used to run ANW1, ANW2, ANW3, an occasional ANW4, and ACL. Then above that were the stakes races. These days they run ANW1, ANW2, and then overnight stakes. I think that has more or less narrowed the gap between solid ALW horses and those non graded and grade 3 races, but also left some of the weaker ALW winners with nowhere to run after they win their ANW2 unless they drop in for a cheaper tag than they may want to run for. This is more or less a way of sticking another condition between ANW2 and the overnight stakes but without the conditions that might make it tougher to fill the races. I’m not sure if it will work, but if it does they should probably consider doing the same thing for state breds even though it’s less of an issue. Typically the state breds have to go into state bred stakes after they win ANW2S, but they can also try open ANW1 if the state bred stakes horses are especially salty.