Horse Racing category: 231 books

For 40 years the most attended sport in New England was thoroughbred racing. Since1933 when pari-mutuel racing was legalized in the region after 300 years of puritanical opposition there were 16 tracks in operation in five New England states. Today there is only one track left and its barely surviving....

“In crisp, elegant prose, Drape captures his subjects and their sport as they wind through a wildly eventful season of racing.” —Laura Hillenbrand, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Seabiscuit   Rich in detail and crackling with wit, The Race for the Triple Crown is a personal narrative...

Derby Innovator is the story of the making of Animal Kingdom by Barry Irwin, a self-taught, self-styled sportsman and entrepreneur who shook racing's Establishment to its very foundations by employing unconventional methods and practices to break all the rules in winning the Kentucky Derby, a race...

The tell-all tale - on and off the track - of a legendary man and his extraordinary family. The Waterhouse name is synonymous with Australian horse racing and bookmaking. For the first time, the family's patriarch, Bill Waterhouse, tells the story of his remarkable life 'playing the odds'. Bill...

Aborigines and the ‘Sport of Kings’ is a celebration of the significant involvement and impact of Aboriginals in Australian horse racing history. Beginning with the remarkable history of Australian Aboriginal people’s first contact with horses and how the European animals caused them bewilderment...

2001 North American Society for Sports History Book of the Year This volume studies the formative period of racing between 1790 and 1914. This was a time when, despite the opposition of a respectable minority, attendance at horse races, betting on horses, or reading about racing increasingly became central leisure activities of much of British society.

People have been racing horses for thousands of years, all over the world. Yet horseracing is often presented as an English creation that was exported, unaltered, to the colonies. This Companion investigates the intersection of racing and literature, art, history and finance, casting the sport as...

The Epsom Derby, established back in 1780 for three-year-old thoroughbred colts and fillies, is today considered to be the most prestigious of the five Classics of the racing calendar, but there was nothing noble about the notorious Derby held in 1844. Marred by horse switching allegations, false age...

In April 1995, a plain brown horse was passed in at the famous Easter Yearling Sales in Sydney, virtually unnoticed. He would go on to become the favourite of racegoers all over Australia. Might and Power was a giant in a golden era of exceptional racehorses: the horse of a lifetime for owner Nick...

In a handicap, horses are assigned weights based on their past performances as a way to try to create evenly matched fields. The better the horse, the heavier the weight assigned. In the United States, handicaps once accounted for the majority of stakes races and were known to boast large purses attracting...

An Irish immigrant, a collection agent for crime bosses, a professional boxer, and a prodigious gambler, John Morrissey was -- if nothing else -- an unlikely candidate to become one of the most important figures in the history of Thoroughbred racing. As a young man, he worked as a political heavy...

Yesterday’s Heroes doesn’t pretend to be a definitive list of the best horses over fence and timber, instead it is an entertaining and informative look at some of the finest and most fascinating horses jump racing has ever seen. Every horse hero featured in the book has his own unique, sometimes...

The Cheltenham Festival is nowadays the biggest event in the racing year – in visitor numbers eclipsing Royal Ascot, the Grand National or the Derby. In 2011 it is a hundred years since the 1911 running of the National Hunt Chase marked the birth of the Festival, providing the perfect occasion for...

An incident of horse doping at a stable inside Jamaica Racetrack in 1938 brought to mind the laxity with which the sport of horse racing was addressing the doping issue. By the early 20th Century jockey clubs and other organizations had clamped down on horse doping. However by the early 1930s the...