Spindrift Stakes
horse race
The Spindrift Stakes was an American Thoroughbred horse race run annually between 1885 and 1909 at Sheepshead Bay Race Track at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York City. A race for three-year-olds, it was contested on dirt over a distance of 1+1⁄4 miles (10 furlongs; 2.0 km) from 1885 to 1892 and at 1+1⁄8 miles (9.0 furlongs; 1.8 km) from 1893 through 1909.
The inaugural running took place on July 11, 1885, and was won by St. Augustine, a John Alcock trained colt owned by George Lorillard. The final running of the Spindrift took place on July 7, 1909, and was won by the Oneck Stable's Fashion Plate, trained by William Karrick.
The 1911–1912 statewide shutdown of horse racing
On June 11, 1908, the Republican controlled New York Legislature under Governor Charles Evans Hughes passed the Hart–Agnew anti-betting legislation. The owners of Sheepshead Bay Race Track, and other racing facilities in New York State, struggled to stay in business without income from betting. Racetrack operators had no choice but to drastically reduce the purse money being paid out which resulted in the Spindrift Stakes offering a purse in 1909 that was nearly one-tenth of what it had been in earlier years. These small purses made horse racing unprofitable and impossible for even the most successful horse owners to continue in business. As such, for the 1910 racing season management of the Sheepshead Bay facility dropped some of its minor stakes races and used the purse money to bolster its most important events.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spindrift Stakes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.