Sometimes the second fiddle gets to play in the first chair. Alydar finally beat Affirmed (albeit through disqualification) in the Travers; Easy Goer vanquished his nemesis Sunday Silence in the Belmont. Though often on the losing end of the rivalry, both Alydar and Easy Goer have, over the years, garnered nearly as much ink as…
The life of a jockey would, inherently, seem to have more than enough drama to make its narrative compelling. Small of stature, often from modest (at best) beginnings, the men who make their living on horseback daily risk injury or worse, fighting their own biology to keep their weights low and their strength high. Add…
“One of my earliest memories,” recalls poet Andrea Cohen, “is Dreamland. When one is going off to Dreamland, one is riding a stallion. When I was very young, before going off to sleep, my brothers and I would say, ‘See you in Dreamland,’ and we’d describe the horse we’d be on.” That’s about the closest…
Steve O’Brien picked up the phone on Sunday, April 10th, the day after the Wood Memorial, and before I finished identifying myself, he asked, “What happened to Uncle Mo?” O’Brien is a racing fan. He grew up in Grand Island, Nebraska, and broke his racing maiden at Fonner Park. “I first went with my family…
Photographer Juliet Harrison describes herself as “your typical horse crazy kid.” Perhaps atypically, she knows exactly when that horse craziness hit. “When I was five years old,” she recalled recently by phone from her home in the Hudson Valley, “I had a babysitter who gave me a picture book of horse breeds. I still have…
In 2010, my racing and literary worlds collided spectacularly when Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule came out of nowhere to win the National Book Award, catapulting both book and author right into this country’s literary conversation and splendidly blending books and the backstretch. If you’re a literary type, you can’t ignore the National Book Award…
…fillies and mares who do defeat males are highly special. In American racing heroines have come along with enough frequency that a female’s outrunning a male is not seen as a freakish occurrence, but it is not so commonplace as to deny each such Amazon her recognition as deserving unusual status. This has been true…
“…grey is not a coat. Then what is it? It can only be a strange pigmentation disease…” Federico Tesio A study of genetics focusing on horses’ colors resulted in Tesio’s mid-20th century declaration. Aesthetic observation brings Barbara Livingston, fortunately, to a different conclusion. “Before I started the book, I knew little about the science of…
A maxim of authorship, it is said, is to write what you know. And there may well be no turf writer who knows trainers better than Karen M. Johnson, author of The Training Game: An Inside Look at American Racing’s Top Trainers. The daughter of trainer P.G. Johnson, who died in August of 2004, Karen…
As I headed to Florida in March, I filled a bag with books, many more, I knew, that I would actually read. (One of the benefits of driving everywhere is that there are no luggage fees or limits. I can overpack to my heart’s content.) Racing books and beach books and literary books—and I’ve been…
Brooklyn Backstretch 