Longtime racing columnist Ray Kerrison dies at 92

Ray Kerrison, a news and racing columnist for the New York Post from 1977 to 2013, died Sunday after a brief illness, the Post reported Monday. He was 92.

Kerrison covered 32 Kentucky Derbies, according to the report.

Kerrison was born in 1930 in Australia and started his journalism career there, according to the report. He joined the New York bureau of News Limited in 1963 and then became editor of the National Star, Rupert Murdoch’s first U.S. publication, in the early '70s before moving to the Post in 1977 to cover horse racing.

"Ray came from Australia as a news and political writer and was to my memory the first turf writer to hold racing executives to account," said John Pricci, who, at Newsday, was a turf-writing contemporary of Kerrison's in New York and now is executive editor of the Horse Race Insider website.

"He was a champion of the sport and its fans," Pricci continued. "He held turf writing to a higher standard, which often drew the ire of his press-box colleagues. He certainly changed the way I looked at the machinations of racing executives and the state racing board that governed it."

Kerrison was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize after uncovering a scandal in 1977 at Belmont Park in which one horse raced under the name of another, according to the Post.