In The Ghost Horse, Joe Layden tells the inspiring true tale of a one-eyed, club-footed thoroughbred racehorse and a journeyman trainer, Tim Snyder, who scraped together every penny he had to purchase the broken and unwanted filly. Snyder helped the horse overcome its deficiencies, eventually naming her in part after his deceased wife, Lisa, the great and only love of his life - a bright and sweet-tempered woman whose gentle demeanour seemed eerily reflected in the horse. The trainer (and now owner) was by nature a crusty and combative sort, the yin to his wife's yang, a racetrack lifer not easily moved by new-age mysticism or sentiment. And yet in those final days back in 2003, when Lisa Snyder lay in bed, her body ravaged by cancer, she reassured her family with a weak smile. "It's okay," she'd say. "I'll see you again. I'm coming back as a horse." Tim Snyder did not then believe in reincarnation. But he acknowledged the strangeness of this journey, the series of coincidences that brought them together, and the undeniable similarities between the horse and his late wife. And so did those who knew the couple well, and who could now only marvel at the story of the filly, Lisa's Booby Trap, and the down-on-his-luck trainer who apparently had been given a new lease on life. The Ghost Horse is a powerful horseracing story of underdogs and second chances.

In 2021, horse racing's most recognizable face - Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert - had five horses that failed postrace drug tests, including that year's Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit. While the incident was a major scandal in the Thoroughbred racing world, it was only the latest in a long string of drug-related infractions among high-caliber athletes. Stories about systemic rule-breaking and "doping culture" - both human and equine -have put world-class athletes and their trainers under intense scrutiny. Each newly discovered instance of abuse forces fans to question the participants' integrity, and in the case of horse racing, their humanity. In Unnatural Ability: The History of Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Thoroughbred Racing, Milton C. Toby addresses the historical and contemporary context of the Thoroughbred industry's most pressing issue. While early attempts at boosting racehorses' performance were admittedly crude, widespread legal access to narcotics and stimulants has changed the landscape of horse racing, along with athletic governing bodies' ability to regulate it. With the sport at a critical turning point in terms of doping restrictions and sports betting, Toby delivers a comprehensive account of the practice of using performance-enhancing drugs to influence the outcome of Thoroughbred races since the late nineteenth century. Paying special attention to Thoroughbred racing's purse structure and its reliance on wagering to supplement a horse's winnings, Toby discusses how horse doping poses a unique challenge for gambling sports and what the industry and its players must do to survive the pressure to get ahead.

The Mongol Derby is the world's toughest horse race. A feat of endurance across the vast Mongolian plains once traversed by the people of Genghis Khan, competitors ride 25 horses across a distance of 1000km. Many riders don't make it to the finish line.

In 2013 Lara Prior-Palmer - nineteen, underprepared but seeking the great unknown - decided to enter the race. Driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses, she raced for seven days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she found she had nothing to lose, and tore through the field with her motley crew of horses. In one of the Derby's most unexpected results, she became the youngest-ever champion and the first woman to win the race.

A tale of adventure, fortitude and poetry, Rough Magic is the extraordinary story of one young woman's encounter with oblivion, and herself.

Burned out by working the baseball beat for years, in the summer of 1922 Damon Runyon was looking for a new sport to cover for The New York American as a change of pace. Having pilloried golf just a few years before, he went to Saratoga that August to sample horse racing and found that "There, right in front of him, were so many of the characters he so loved from his time covering the comings and goings of the Manhattan night crowd." This was just the tonic Runyon needed to emerge from his malaise. Runyon didn't just cover the great races and which horse won: he would get to the track days before and roam along the backstretch, speaking with the trainers, the gamblers, the rich owners, and the wise guys, many of which became model characters in his fiction and in the musical Guys and Dolls. This book collects the best of Runyon's horse racing columns to 1936, when he moved on to other beats. In addition to an introduction, Reisler will include a "cast of characters" that will provide short biographies of a number of people Runyon discusses in his columns.

Discover a story that defies belief: National Velvet meets Downton Abbey with a splash of The Leopard. * LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR * Czechoslovakia, October 1937. Vast crowds have gathered to watch the Grand Pardubice steeplechase, Europe's most blood-curdling sporting test of manhood. With war looming, the race has a brutal political significance. The Nazis have sent the SS's all-conquering paramilitary horsemen to crush - yet again - the 'subhuman Slavs'. But Lata Brandisova, a silver-haired countess on a little golden mare, has other ideas... 'Heart-stopping reading' Clover Stroud, Daily Telegraph

In between his romances with baseball, in early 1969 Bill Veeck took up the challenge of managing Boston's semi-moribund Suffolk Downs racetrack. "Being of sound mind and in reasonable possession of my faculties," Veeck wrote, "I marshaled my forces, at the tender age of fifty-four, and marched upon the city of Boston, Massachusetts, like a latter-day Ben Franklin, to seek my fame and fortune as the operator of a racetrack. Two years later, fortune having taken one look at my weathered features and shaken its hoary locks, I retreated, smiling gamely." When he took over the track, Veeck had yet to learn that the normal daily output of some sixteen hundred horses (including straw) would amount to so much, or be so hard to dispose of. But that was the least of his problems. In the tough-minded and Tabasco-tongued prose that is his trademark, Veeck recalls the battles he won and lost, the fun he had, and what he discovered about horse racing at "Sufferin' Downs." It's a zesty, complicated story but a relentlessly fascinating one about the inside workings of one of the most popular sports in America.

__________________ The bookies always win. But one man has been proving them wrong for four decades. In the summer of 1975 Barney Curley, a fearless and renowned gambler, masterminded one of the most spectacular gambles of all time with a racehorse called Yellow Sam. With a meticulous, entirely legal plan involving dozens of people, perfectly timed phone calls, sealed orders and months of preparation, Curley and Yellow Sam beat the bookmakers and cost them millions. They said that it could never happen again. But in May 2010, thirty-five years after his first coup, Curley staged the ultimate multi-million-pound-winning sequel. The Sure Thing tells the complete story of how he managed to organise the biggest gamble in racing history - and how he then followed up with yet another audacious scheme in January 2014.

Here, for the first time, is the story of how America's first national resort gave birth to, then nurtured, its first national sport, introducing the country to a parade of champions and their spectacular supporting characters. To experience this adventure is to see why the Saratoga Race Course, America's oldest major sports facility remains one of its most beloved and most successful. They're Off! is as much a social history as it is sports history. Edward Hotaling opens with a little-known visit by the first famous tourist, George Washington, who tried to buy the place he called "the Saratoga Springs". Soon the pursuit of happiness at our original vacationland helped redefine America. Even at the height of the Civil War, the country's first organized sport was launched on a national scale.

The book is an account of one very ordinary person's quest to become a racehorse owner and his growing obsession with and love for the sport. This is not a book about famous jockeys, trainers and horses. It is a story of the challenges and low points facing an owner on a budget but it also describes the elation and joy when things do, eventually, go right. There is also a useful section of tips and do's and don'ts for those who want to have a go at ownership for themselves.