Team Valor International firmed up plans on Tuesday to send Lucky Chappy to Dubai for the $2-million United Arab Emirates Derby on March 31 at Meydan racecourse.
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Team Valor International enjoyed a record season on the racetrack in 2011 but is already well ahead of that pace over the first ten weeks of 2012.
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Animal Kingdom will miss his intended start in the Dubai World Cup after developing lameness in his left hind leg over the weekend at Palm Meadows Training Center.
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Howe Great completed a perfect winter at Gulfstream Park on Sunday and solidified his spot among the top 3-year-olds on turf in the United States. In connecting as the heavy favorite in the Grade 3 Palm Beach Stakes for his fourth consecutive win, Team Valor International’s home-bred colt cleared a path to a high-profile opportunity on another surface this spring.
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Barry Irwin’s Team Valor International, the perennial leader in stakes wins among North Americans public racing syndicates, has stolen a march on the competition and is already 3 wins clear of its nearest rival. Team Valor has already recorded 5 stakes victories, including one today in Kentucky with State of Play. ... More
State of Play continued Team Valor International’s hot hand with 3-year-olds at Turfway Park today when he proved a determined winner of the Battaglia Memorial Handicap. Last spring, the Kentucky-based stable won the $500,000 Spiral Stakes with its budding star Animal Kingdom, who used the Grade 3 fixture as a springboard to a victory in the Classic, G1 Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs.
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Went The Day Well ran like the even-money choice he was today at Gulfstream Park, where he broke his maiden second time out on dirt and around two turns for Team Valor International and English resident Mark Ford. Team Valor’s Barry Irwin bought a majority interest from Ford last fall after the colt had finished a big second in his racing debut. ... More
Team Valor International has issued an automatic nomination to Ray Paulick for the inaugural Stanley Bergstein Writing Award, recognizing a January 16 story from the Paulick Report that exposed a Pennsylvania scam involving retired racehorses.
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Frank Deford, Bill Nack, Bill Christine and Richard Eng will serve as judges for Team Valor International’s inaugural Stanley Bergstein Writing Award.
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In a late January wave, Team Valor bunched together 6 wins in 7 days. Barry Irwin’s international racing stable was right back at it over President’s Day weekend, as reigning Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom led a charge of 4 victories in 6 starts for the Team Valor roster, which has burst out of the gate with a 30 percent win clip over the first 7 weeks of 2012.
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Kentucky Derby-winning champion Animal Kingdom, who had not raced since sustaining an injury in the Belmont Stakes last June, returned to action with a stylish display as the 3-5 favorite in Saturday's 5TH race at Gulfstream Park.
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The first word out of trainer Graham Motion’s mouth after his Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom cruised to an easy win launching his comeback in Saturday’s fifth race at Gulfstream Park was “exhale.” For the rest of us, it was “Wow!”
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There are moments of grace, if we are lucky, in all our lives. Tom Furey’s came at the track. The time was May 7, 2011 at Churchill Downs, in Louisville, Ky., aka the Kentucky Derby. Furey, a retired IBM exec, was a 5-percent owner, or partner, in Animal Kingdom, scheduled to race that day.
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Animal Kingdom will begin his 4-year-old season much like the launch to his Kentucky Derby triumph last year, as Graham Motion decided this morning to bring Team Valor International’s champion back in a turf allowance race at Gulfstream Park on Saturday instead of waiting a week for the Grade 3 Tampa Bay Stakes.
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Team Valor International and Richard Santulli have purchased Champion South American miler Brujo de Olleros and will import the once-beaten Wild Event colt on February 20 from Uruguay.
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Team Valor International is off to a flying start with its international stable in the month of January, as just this week Barry Irwin’s stable of syndicated runners has won races on three different continents, namely North America, Europe and Africa. ... More
Team Valor International’s gigantic 4-year-old filly Ebony Flyer erased the memory of her first poor effort last time out in the Grade 1 Queen’s Plate by powering to an ultra-impressive victory today in the Grade 1 Majorca Stakes going a mile at Kenilworth race course in Cape Town, South Africa. ... More
Team Valor International’s Agra was not exactly a secret as the odds-on 2 to 5 favorite to make the Listed Schweppes Summer Juvenile Stakes her second win from as many outings. However, other than The Snaith Family, few racegoers today at Kenilworth were prepared to witness the utter disdain with which she dispatched her opposition in such effortless style, with a display of speed rarely witnessed by a lightly raced 2-year-old in such promising company. ... More
When home-bred Howe Great crossed under the wire 2 ½ lengths clear of stablemate Lucky Chappy giving Team Valor International a 1-2 finish in Gulfstream Park’s $100,000 Kitten’s Joy Stakes, he provided his breeder Barry Irwin with his 250th victory in a stakes with a horse he had syndicated since 1987. ... More
Home-bred Howe Great led a 1-2 Team Valor International finish today in the featured Kitten’s Joy Stakes, a $100,000 stakes at Gulfstream Park for 3-year-olds going 1 1/16 miles on the grass.
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Comtesse Dubois, facing older fillies and mares, surged from last to first under veteran reinsman Glen Hatt to win today’s Laisserfaire Stakes by a neck going 5 ½ furlongs on turf at Kenilworth race course. Her win marks the 249th stakes victory for the stable.
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Animal Kingdom’s Kentucky Derby triumph resonated as the deciding factor in the most dramatic category at the 41st Eclipse Awards ceremony on Monday night in Beverly Hills, as the Team Valor International home-bred prevailed as champion 3-year-old male of 2011.
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Team Valor International and its home-bred Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom are both finalists for Eclipse Awards, the year-end honors for American racing that will be presented on January 16 in Beverly Hills, California.
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Team Valor International completed yet another record-breaking season in 2011, smashing the mark for earnings with combined gleanings of $3,978,167.
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Team Valor International’s Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom had his first workout on the comeback trail for trainer Graham Motion under a bright blue sky on a crisp Saturday morning over the main dirt track at the Fair Hill training center near Elkton, Maryland. Going in company, Animal Kingdom breezed around the far turn on the one-mile oval and was timed in 38 seconds.
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THE TEAM 
