Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes:

Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.

Author Laura Hillenbrand brilliantly re-creates a universal underdog story, one that proves life is a horse race.


From the Hardcover edition.

How well do you know your racing? You follow the form, share in the agony of defeat and the elation of success, but how much of that information do you remember? The Racing Post Quiz Book will provide hours of entertainment and challenge horse racing know-it-alls to prove themselves. Categories range from where this uniquely historic sport started right up to the modern day, taking in the best horses, most successful trainers, the heroic jockeys and many more besides. With 1,000 questions, many fiendish, some infuriating, this is the ultimate test for any racing fan.

The Queen's Plate was inaugurated, with royal blessing, on Wednesday, June 27, 1860, at the Carleton track in Toronto, located in bucolic surroundings near what is now the traffic-strangled southwestern corner of Keele and Dundas streets. There is no reason to believe that Queen Victoria was a wild-eyed devotee of horse racing. However, Her Majesty granted the petition of the little turf club in the boisterous Upper Canada community (the population of Toronto was 44,425) and offered as an annual prize, "a plate to the value of Fifty Guineas." And thus Canadian horse racing was established as "the sport of royalty." Today, the Queen's Plate is the first jewel in Canada's Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing and the longest continuously run stakes race in North America. It takes place every June, and the first-place purse is $1 million. The Plate is unquestionably Canada's most famous, one-day social and sporting event. This book explores the colourful history of the Queen's Plate through words and archival photographs.

This is the true story of the most remarkable horse in history. Foaled in the lavish Ottoman stables of the Topkapl Palace in the late 1870s, this dark bay stallion was hard schooled in the disciplines of war. Until now, his remarkable story has never been told.

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.