Until now, says Fenwick’s brother Charles, a five time winner

the country’s most challenging horse race

The Maryland Hunt Cup, one of the most coveted prizes in the dangerous sport of steeplechasing, involves riding canada goose uk black friday a four mile course over 22 tall timber fences. Established in 1894 as a friendly contest between two local fox hunts, the once legendary sport is Canada Goose Online now looking to bring in new blood as the number of racehorse owners declines. buy canada goose jacket (Alice Li/The Washington Post)

The dark brown thoroughbred is galloping not around a racetrack but across open farmland that is staked out on this late April afternoon with red and white flags. He’s a big animal with a giant stride. canada goose clearance But at this point he’s barely visible to a couple of thousand people, some peering through Canada Goose sale binoculars, from a natural cheap canada goose grandstand on a grassy Maryland hillside. He’s leading about 10 horses uphill at a divot churning pace toward a stout, 4 foot 10 inch post and rail fence a structure that has stood here for close to a century, ever since the most challenging horse race in America was first run across these fields.

The voice rises in excitement as the horse launches heavenward: “Foyle is the one to catch!”

The big horse clips the top rail the commentator stumbles in surprise and heaves to the left, pitching his rider, puppet like, to canada goose coats the earth. He plummets forward, rolls over his now empty saddle and scrambles to his feet.

“Foyle went down..”

His jockey Sam Waley Cohen, who flew in from England “for the experience” of competing in this rigorous test of canada goose uk shop horsemanship is not the first to fall. Olympic pentathlete and Maryland native Suzanne Stettinius Canada Goose Parka hit the ground at the second fence. But the commentator and the crowd on the hillside have already shifted focus to the finish, where two horses are running neck and neck between rows of standing spectators.

It takes 16 minutes for photos to reveal which horse won almost twice the time it took them to complete the four mile, 22 fence race. And it is several more minutes before the 2014 Maryland Hunt Cup, a silver tankard bearing the state’s coat of arms, and a challenge cup made by the celebrated early 19th century silversmith Paul Storr, are presented to the winning owner, who clambers, along with his horse’s trainer and jockey, onto a painted hay canadian goose jacket wagon to receive them. He’ll get 60 percent of the $75,000 prize money enough to keep his horse in hay for the coming year, but a fraction of the $1.5million purse that will soon be awarded (along with nationwide fame and a blanket of 4,000 flowers) in the Preakness Stakes, 15 miles away at Pimlico.

Waley Cohen is recounting his ride to the other muddied men and women who didn’t make it to the hay wagon. Foyle, he says, “was loving it, jumping from fence to fence,” until “he didn’t go high enough.”

The need to go both high and fast puts the Maryland Hunt Cup on a par with the world’s most storied steeplechase: England’s Grand National. But the canada goose store race, which started in 1894 as a friendly canada goose coats on sale challenge between two local fox hunts, is also deeply embedded in the lore and landscape of the valleys north of Baltimore where Alfred G. Vanderbilt once bred Triple Crown contenders.

With its local roots and global renown, the Hunt Cup is the most coveted trophy in the uniquely American pursuit of “timber racing” a dangerous and endangered sport that is seeking to expand its horizons even as its world is shrinking. Tickets can be purchased online until noon on April 20.]

Photos from the ’50s show tens of thousands of people on the hillside. These days, the canada goose uk outlet crowd is closer to 5,000. Even within the rarefied realms of steeplechasing, (named for the Irish practice of chasing over hedge and ditch from church steeple to church steeple), racing over rigid posts and rails rather canada goose clearance sale than brush hurdles is uncommon.

The timber race that attracts most attention in the Washington region is the Virginia Gold Cup, where a hat wearing, high society crowd of 50,000 tailgates beside the manicured turf and four foot fences in Fauquier County. The tussocks here in Maryland could turn an ankle, and the jumps are higher, but the opportunities for social climbing are not. You might spot a Canada Goose online tweedy European ambassador on the hillside, but you’re unlikely to see a Salahi.

The Hunt Cup, on the last Saturday of April, is the climax in a series of three weekend race meetings, a hard fought rivalry that has defined the daily activities and lifelong ambitions of a few families Bosleys and Brewsters, Fishers and Fenwicks who have sold one another horses and married one another’s offspring over decades. Competing “was a rite of passage for the boys of the valleys,” says Michael Wharton, who owns one of the speediest horses around. And racing against Waley Cohen last uk canada goose outlet year was Canada Goose Coats On Sale Adair Bonsal Stifel, who became canada goose the fourth generation of Bonsals (and first female in her family) to compete “at the ripe old age of cheap canada goose uk 47.”

“I decided to go for it the day before the race,” says Stifel, who broke her leg in a fall at the ninth fence. “The canada goose black friday sale heritage, the history, was a big part of it.”

A uk canada goose heritage that gives new meaning to Canada Goose Jackets keeping things in the family.

“I bred the horse, and I bred the jockey. And I also bred the dam and granddam of the winner,” exclaimed Janon Fisher Jr. in 1962 after watching his son, Janon buy canada goose jacket cheap Fisher III, ride to victory.

When early nominations for the 2015 race came out in March, three of the 18 horses were trained by a Fisher. That’s Janon Jr.’s brother’s grandson Jack, whose mother’s grandfather and uncle owned winning horses while her husband and son (that’s Jack again) rode winners. To complicate things further, one of Janon Fisher Jr.’s grandsons is Adair Stifel’s husband.

That tribal tradition is the centerpiece of a way of life based on the “shared experiences” of farming and fox hunting, explains Peter Fenwick, president of the Valleys Planning Council, a nonprofit devoted to protecting the region’s rural nature from the relentless hoofbeats of change.

“Everybody was somehow connected to horses” when he was growing up, says Fenwick, 47. Now children choose lacrosse or baseball on weekends rather than riding. Families move away. The lack of locals capable of navigating the Hunt Cup’s fences at breakleg speed has sent trainers in search of talent overseas for men and women from Ireland or England, like Waley Cohen.

And most new settlers here would rather watch from the hillside than invest in the natives’ high risk, no profit hobby. Until now, says Fenwick’s brother Charles, a five time winner of the race, the steeplechasing community “has done zero to reach out.”

“If the sport is to survive,” says Stifel, “we’ve got to work on bringing in new blood.”

The race has launched a new cheap Canada Goose Web site where spectators can buy tickets, which must be purchased ahead of the event.

And last fall, as part of a new task force, Charles Fenwick stepped up to an unlikely challenge: create topcanadagoose a marketplace and perhaps “an canada goose factory sale eBay for steeplechase horses.” This month, Fenwick chaired a symposium featuring speakers such as Wharton, followed by a live auction with innovative deals designed to give prospective owners a whiff of the oats.

Bruce Fenwick, left, and Phil Briones ride timber racing champions Foyle and Bon Caddo during a training run overlooking Sagamore Farm in Baltimore County. (Lance Rosenfield/Prime)

Among the animals being trotted up for contention in the new steeplechase saving marketplace is De Chera. The handsome chestnut is stabled alongside Foyle, a champion over timber, at Belmont Farm, with its view across the valley to the Hunt Cup course and a repair shop out back run by another Fenwick brother, Bruce, 65. There are tractors and trailer hitches, muck Canada Goose Outlet spreaders and dismantled mowers.