Can you think of any equine heroes in the sport of horse racing?
Some horses have come and gone. Others have left their mark on people’s hearts. Can you think of any horses who gave people hope? Or ones that the public really connected with?
Such as Seabiscuit giving the people hope during the great depression.
Thanks! =D
Secretariat became the first subject to land on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and Time Magazine the same week; I think Secretariat came at a time when people needed a hero– we were suffering from the divisiveness of the Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal was starting to make headlines, there was a kind of disillusionment that many people seemed to feel. And along comes this blazing red chestnut horse who wins and wins and wins, taking the Triple Crown after people had speculated that maybe there would never be another Triple Crown winner.
I think that during World War II, Count Fleet was a hero; he won the “street-car Derby” of 1943. (The Defense Department had wanted to cancel the Derby, wanting to discourage the use of private cars because gasoline and the rubber to make care tires were commodities being rationed during the war. Kentucky Colonel Matt Winn, the impresario/promoter who made the Derby the legendary race it became, vowed to run the Derby even if only ten people showed up to watch it. He pulled strings and called in favors to get public transportation to take people to the races and the 1943 Derby went off on schedule.) Count Fleet won the Triple Crown and showed awesome talent doing so; he won the Belmont by 25 lengths, the largest winning margin until Secretariat came along. http://www.spiletta.com/UTHOF/countfleet.html
Native Dancer became the first equine star of the TV age; he was a grey, which meant that in the black-and-white broadcasts, he was easy to pick out of the fields of darker horses. He won every race he ran in except one…the Kentucky Derby.
I think Stymie, “the people’s horse,” was a hero of his time. Stymie was claimed for $1500, practically the bottom of the barrel for claiming horses, and went on to win $918,000 in a career that saw him defeat many notables. He had a high-headed style of running, very prideful-looking; and coming from obscurity to beat many of the best horses of his day, a lot of working-class people identified with him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stymie_(horse)
If you want to go back a good deal further, in the 1800′s there were a series of epic match races that pitted the best of the north against the pride of the south. Champion racers Boston and Fashion duked it out in an 1842 match that was attended by at least 40 US Senators; http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2536601509.html.
Equine Center Raises Bar in Horse Medicine
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