Fair Hill Training Center

Fair Hill -- Much has been made of the serene setting where Kentucky Derby winner and Preakness darling Barbaro has been training at the Fair Hill Training Center in the northern reaches of the state. While other stakes horses are often quartered and trained in the more competitive atmosphere of racetracks, Barbaro resides and works in a decidedly quieter, more pastoral place where the contrasting gentle pace has become a subplot in the dark bay colt's Triple Crown quest. That the 350-acre training center exists at all - along with an adjoining public recreation area nearly 16 times larger - is the result of the ambitious, even obsessive, accumulation of land in the first half of the 20th century by a scion of one of America's wealthiest families and later, a fortuitous purchase by the state.

Today: The $75,000, 1 3/16-mile Harrison E. Johnson Memorial Handicap features another showdown between top older horses Richie The Coach and Western Echo. But Donald H. Barr, trainer of Richie The Coach, says he'll likely scratch the 6-year-old gelding if the track is muddy. Stabled at Fair Hill Training Center, trainer Gene Weymouth starts Colonial Secretary. Weymouth has saddled a phenomenal 12 winners out of 27 starters at the Laurel meet.Tomorrow: The $30,000, seven-furlong Notches Trace Stakes is for older fillies and mares who have never won a stakes.

After his 12-hour ride from Kentucky and night in his barn at the Fair Hill Training Center, Derby winner Animal Kingdom was walked once around the main track this morning and returned to his stall. Trainer Graham Motion said “it was pretty much by design to give him an easy day. " "He looks great. I can’t believe he just ran the biggest race of his life four days ago and shipped from Kentucky," Motion said this morning. It was the first time Animal Kingdon had been on a track since the Derby.

Jack Fisher on Moro's Lucky Penny edged Matthew McCarron on Damaselle yesterday and won the John Murray Begg Memorial timber race at the Marlborough Point-to-Point at Roedown Farm in Davidsonville.The races were held for the first time in September after the regularly scheduled card on April 4 was canceled because of wet weather.Baltimore-area trainers Tom Voss, Doug Worrall and Joe Gillet as well as Fisher won races.Trainer Michael Dickinson, who stables his horses at the Fair Hill Training Center in Cecil County, won three flat races, all for Pennsylvania owner Mrs. Henry Paxson.

Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom, stabled at Fair Hill Training Center since his victory, arrived at Pimlico Race Course this morning for today's 136th Preakness. Unlike most Derby winners, who usually arrive mid-week to begin preparations for the second leg of the Triple Crown, Animal Kingdom trainer Graham Motion chose to keep his colt in the quiet surroundings of Fair Hill, Md., about 60 miles north of Baltimore in Cecil County. Animal Kingdom made the move this morning by van with several of his stablemates who will be running in Preakness undercard races today.

ELMONT, N.Y. -- It isn't the Triple Crown, but Better Talk Now, the 9-year-old veteran gelding who trains at the Fair Hill Training Center, will be going for his own prestigious feat tomorrow when he attempts to win the $400,000 Woodford Reserve Manhattan Handicap about an hour before Big Brown is to run in the Belmont Stakes. A Manhattan double hasn't been accomplished in nearly two decades, not since Milesius swept the race in 1988 and 1989. Better Talk Now is the 2004 Breeders' Cup Turf champion and has five Grade I victories.

Looking for a horse with the makings to be a star in 2007? Michael Matz, who brought Barbaro from the Fair Hill Training Center to win the Kentucky Derby last year, might just have one. Chelokee, a 3-year-old sired by Cherokee Run, owned by Centenial Farms and trained at the Maryland stable until recently being shipped to Florida for the winter season, could just be - if not another Derby winner - at least a strong contender. Horses who start fast as 2-year-olds don't win the Kentucky Derby.

Xchanger, the 3-year-old son of Exchange Rate and the winner of Saturday's Federico Tesio Stakes at Pimlico Race Course, still doesn't know where he will be on the first Saturday in May. Will he be at the Kentucky Derby or in his Fair Hill Training Center stall? The colt's owners, Circle Z Stables, which includes Baltimorean Domenico Zannino and trainer Mark Shuman, have the option of entering him in the Derby, looking ahead to the Preakness or selling him. Shuman said last night offers for at least seven figures have been received, but so far no one has hit "the magic" number.

Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time and current Canton dweller , headed north to visit another of the state's most successful sportsmen, horse trainer Graham Motion. Phelps' coach, Bob Bowman, tweeted the above photo of the two outside one of Motion's barns at the peaceful, sprawling Fair Hill Training Center in Elkton this afternoon. It was Bowman who got Phelps into racing. He'd picked up an interest years ago because a swimming coach he was working with liked to go out to the races.

Three months after a fire swept through a Cecil County horse barn, killing 24 thoroughbreds, investigators have not determined what caused it, a spokesman for the state fire marshal said yesterday. The fire marshal's office sent a letter this month to a Virginia horse owner, saying the fire was under "criminal investigation," but Deputy State Fire Marshal W. Faron Taylor said yesterday that the description was a matter of "semantics." Taylor said fire investigators have no evidence that the Nov. 1 blaze at the state-owned Fair Hill Training Center was arson.