Raven’s Range
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Seabiscuit is the suberbly researched story of possibly the most famous racehorse of all time (although I should imagine that most Brits of a certain age would remember the amazing disappearing Shergar, and Red Rum who won the Grand National multiple times).

During the Great Depression, there was a collison of lives that changed racing history. Somehow Seabiscuit, an overlooked and mismanaged horse, Tom Smith the trainer, Charles Howard the owner and Red Pollard the jockey all managed to find one another. The resulting tale of serendipity and taking chances would be enough to keep you reading on its own.

But what truly stands out here are the descriptions of the life of a jockey, and of life in the 1930s in general: it was a time where horse racing offered people a much-needed escapism from a harsh time, and jockeys were both heroes and slaves. Each horse was given a handicap — a weight it must carry — to even out the odds, and the jockeys had to fit accordingly. The “reducing” they underwent caused long-lasting health problems, and left them as emaciated as the average modern supermodel. Many were so weak that they would pass out before races.

It was a desperately hard life. Red Pollard, Seabiscuit’s jockey, survived crushing injuries and concealed that he was blind in one eye–had this been known, his career would have been over. Seabiscuit sustained an injury from which he was not expected to recover. But together, they went on to win the hundred-grander race long after most horses were retired or sent to stud.

And in fact this race was the culmination of both their careers: while Seabiscuit went on to glory and stud, Pollard faded into obscurity, continuing as a jockey but flailing from loss to loss. The flame of a jockey’s career is short, and this is at its core a sad tale; while there are certainly triumphs, I had no idea of the fate of the jockey himself.

At times almost too detailed, the book nevertheless keeps a light-heartedness about it and draws heavily on many interviews and anecdotes. The descriptions of all the antics performed by taciturn trainer Tom Smith to hide Seabiscuit’s potential from the press are hilarious. Sometimes he would substitute a lesser but identical horse, and have the horse perform badly; at other times he would set a training for the middle of the night. This dance, apparently, went on for years.

I did wonder where the author based her assessment of what was going through people’s minds–people who were long-dead–but it seems that she followed up on a list of hundreds of people who remembered the main characters and events from their youth or family legends, and interviewed as many as she could. She was given access to family stories and photograph albums, and as a result provides a rich story that never ceases to amaze.

It is the humanity that keeps the book from being only a dry accounting of a period in history. I couldn’t care less about horse racing, but I picked it the book up because of the movie, and I’m glad I took the time. The movie, while wonderful, does not really bring across the hardships and nuances of the time, a gap which is amply filled in by this book.

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