Thoroughbred racing stretches from a colt foaled during a solar eclipse in 1764 to a champion whose remains are shared by three museums. Along the way come a bare-knuckle boxer who founded racing at Saratoga, an enslaved jockey who beat the unbeaten Lexington, a grand New York track that now lies under a reservoir, and a garland of roses with one bloom pointing up. These stories visit Kentucky, New York, California, England and Australia.
Every tile in a Horse Racing game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Champion Horses
nine stories
1The colt named for the sky on the day he was born
On the tile: Eclipse1764
On April 1, 1764, a chestnut colt was born in England during a solar eclipse, so he was named Eclipse. He did not race until he was five, then went unbeaten in 18 races, eight of them walkovers because no rival could be found to run against him. As a stallion he proved so successful that he appears somewhere in the pedigrees of most Thoroughbreds today. America's year-end racing honors are the Eclipse Awards, and his name has been set aside so that no other horse can have it.
2The blind stallion sent north to escape the Civil War
On the tile: Lexington1855-1865
At New Orleans in April 1855, Lexington ran four miles in a record 7 minutes, 19 3/4 seconds, but poor eyesight, a problem his sire shared, ended his racing that year. Known as the Blind Hero of Woodburn, he led North America's sire list a record 16 times. Confederate guerrillas raided Woodburn Farm in October 1864 and again in February 1865, riding off with valuable horses, but Lexington was spared. That spring his owner, Robert A. Alexander, shipped him and about 50 of the farm's best Thoroughbreds to Illinois for safekeeping.
3The filly who made the Kentucky Derby a national event
On the tile: Regret1915
Before 1915, 29 fillies had run in the Kentucky Derby and none had won. Churchill Downs leader Matt Winn persuaded Harry Payne Whitney to bring his filly Regret, and she took the lead, held off her old rival Pebbles and won by two lengths before an estimated 49,000 people. "I don't care if she ever starts again," Whitney said. The national coverage helped turn a regional race into an American spectacle. Only two fillies have won the Derby since: Genuine Risk in 1980 and Winning Colors in 1988.
In the spring of 1918, Willis Sharpe Kilmer bought a lanky chestnut named Exterminator strictly as a workmate for his star colt, Sun Briar. When Sun Briar trained poorly, Kilmer kept him out of the Kentucky Derby and sent the workmate instead. At 30-1, Exterminator won by a length. Fans called him Old Bones, and the New York Herald called him "the Abe Lincoln of race horses," yet he raced through 1924 and won 50 of his 100 starts. In retirement he lived with a succession of stable ponies, every one of them named Peanuts.
Sir Barton had never won a race when he lined up for the 1919 Kentucky Derby. He was a cranky colt with soft feet, and he was supposed to set the pace for his better-known stablemate, Billy Kelly. Nobody told Sir Barton. He led all the way in a driving rain and won by five lengths. Four days later he won the Preakness, and he took the Belmont in American-record time. He was the first horse to win all three races, before anyone had coined the phrase Triple Crown.
A favorite sports story says the word upset was born on August 13, 1919, when a colt named Upset beat Man o' War at Saratoga, the only loss in Man o' War's 21-race career. The loss was real: Man o' War was sideways and unprepared when the field was sent away. The word story is not. Racing writers described favorites being upset as early as 1857, and in 1877 The New York Times warned that at Monmouth Park "there may be a startling upset."
Phar Lap was foaled near Timaru, New Zealand, in 1926 and became a national symbol in Australia, where he won the 1930 Melbourne Cup. He died suddenly in Menlo Park, California, on April 5, 1932, and the two countries shared what remained. His hide was mounted at Melbourne Museum, his heart went to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and his skeleton went home to Te Papa in Wellington. In 2010, for the 150th Melbourne Cup, the skeleton was lent to Melbourne and shown beside the hide for the first time.
Secretariat won the 1973 Preakness, but Pimlico's electronic timer recorded 1:55, and the official time was set at 1:54 2/5. Two Daily Racing Form clockers had each timed him by hand at 1:53 2/5. The argument lasted decades. In June 2012, at the request of owner Penny Chenery and Pimlico's president, the Maryland Racing Commission heard testimony backed by modern technology and voted 7-0 to change the time to 1:53, a stakes record. His Kentucky Derby and Belmont records still stood.
Jerry Moss, a co-founder of A&M Records, and his wife, Ann, paid $60,000 for a yearling filly in 2005 and named her Zenyatta, after Zenyatta Mondatta, an album by the label's band The Police. She did not race until late 2007, then won 19 races in a row and became the first filly or mare to win the Breeders' Cup Classic. In the 2010 Classic at Churchill Downs she had a chance to retire unbeaten, but Blame beat her by a head, her only loss in 20 starts.
1The enslaved jockey who beat the unbeatable Lexington
On the tile: Abe Hawkins1854
Abe Hawkins was enslaved for most of his riding career, and no record survives of his birth or family. In April 1854 at the Metairie Course in New Orleans, Lecomte's trainer, an enslaved man known only as Hark, urged that Hawkins ride against the unbeaten Lexington. Riding at 89 pounds, Hawkins won both four-mile heats, the first in record time. It was the only defeat of Lexington's career. Freed when the Union Army seized New Orleans in 1862, Hawkins went north and won 25 documented races from 1864 through 1866.
Born into slavery in Virginia around 1806, Ansel Williamson became one of America's finest trainers and conditioned the undefeated Asteroid. On May 17, 1875, Aristides, a small chestnut he trained, with Oliver Lewis riding, won the first Kentucky Derby by two lengths before about 10,000 people and set an American record for a 3-year-old at a mile and a half. The colt was named not for the ancient Athenian statesman but for owner H. Price McGrath's friend Aristides Welch. That same year Williamson won the Belmont Stakes with Calvin.
3The jockey whose winning rate nobody can pin down
On the tile: Isaac Murphy1884-1891
Isaac Murphy got his first ride at Churchill Downs at 14 and finished dead last. He went on to become the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby three times and the first to win it in back-to-back years, in 1890 and 1891, and he was known as a finesse rider who rarely used the whip. His winning percentage is harder to fix. Some sources credit him with 628 wins from 1,412 mounts, about 44 percent, while other records show 530 wins from 1,538.
4The crouching jockey who inspired a Broadway musical
On the tile: Tod Sloan1897
In the 1890s, Tod Sloan rode crouched with short stirrups and popularized a style that changed race riding. In 1898 he won 166 of his 362 races, nearly 46 percent. He first took his style to England in 1897, where racegoers called him Toddy and he won the Ascot Gold Cup, and George M. Cohan called him Yankee Doodle Dandy in a Broadway musical based on his life. Suspicion that he bet on his own mounts ended his career in 1900, and he later worked in vaudeville and the movies.
5The trainer who won the Triple Crown with father and son
On the tile: Fitzsimmons1930-1935
James "Sunny Jim" Fitzsimmons was born in Brooklyn in 1874 on land where the Sheepshead Bay racetrack was later built. He became a jockey at 15, began training when his riding career failed to take off, and kept at it until 1963. For Belair Stud he trained Gallant Fox to the Triple Crown in 1930 and Gallant Fox's son Omaha to the Triple Crown in 1935. His 13 wins in Triple Crown races stood as the record for 56 years, until D. Wayne Lukas won his 14th in 2013.
6The jockey who misjudged the finish, then won at 54
On the tile: Bill Shoemaker1957-1986
In the 1957 Kentucky Derby, Bill Shoemaker infamously misjudged the finish line aboard Gallant Man and lost. The pair came back to win the Belmont Stakes by eight lengths in American-record time. Shoemaker recovered too. In 1970 he passed Johnny Longden's record for career wins, and he retired in 1990 with 8,833, a total that stood as the record until Laffit Pincay Jr. passed it in 1999. His last Kentucky Derby win came in 1986 on Ferdinand, when Shoemaker was 54.
7Seven races, seven winners, one afternoon at Ascot
On the tile: Dettori1996
On September 28, 1996, Frankie Dettori rode the winners of all seven races on the card at Ascot, a day that became known as the Magnificent Seven. The last winner, Fujiyama Crest, had been a 12-1 shot that morning and went off as the 2-1 favorite. A bet on all seven paid 25,095-1, and the afternoon cost the betting industry as much as 40 million pounds. One self-employed carpenter who staked 67.58 pounds collected more than 550,000.
8The trainer who turned a $1,500 claim into a champion
On the tile: Hirsch Jacobs1943
Hirsch Jacobs rose from training a stable of claiming horses to become North America's leading trainer 11 times in 12 years, beginning in 1933. In 1943 he claimed a horse named Stymie for $1,500. Stymie lost the first 13 races of his career, but Jacobs kept him running. By the time Stymie retired, he had won 35 of 131 starts and was the sport's all-time leading money winner. When Jacobs died in 1970, he had saddled the winners of a record 3,596 races.
9The teenager who conquered racing on two continents
On the tile: Steve Cauthen1977-1987
In 1977, while still an apprentice, Kentucky teenager Steve Cauthen became the first jockey to earn $6 million in purses in a single season, and Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Year. The next year he rode Affirmed to the Triple Crown. Then he moved to England, adapted to a different style of riding and was champion jockey there in 1984, 1985 and 1987, winning the Epsom Derby twice. He was the first rider to win the Kentucky, Epsom, Irish, French and Italian Derbys.
The Twin Spires of Churchill Downs were not in the original plans. In 1895, 24-year-old draftsman Joseph Dominic Baldez was drawing the blueprints for a new grandstand when he decided the building needed something to give it a striking appearance, so he added two hexagonal spires. Each spire has eight rounded windows, open in the early days and closed now. Matt Winn, a Churchill Downs president, is reported to have told Baldez that the spires were one monument that would never be taken down.
John Morrissey was an undefeated American bare-knuckle boxing champion who ran gambling houses in New York City when he organized a four-day Thoroughbred meeting at Saratoga Springs in 1863, a month after the Battle of Gettysburg. On August 3, a filly named Lizzie W., with a one-eyed jockey aboard, won the first official Thoroughbred race there. The meeting was a success, and in 1864 Morrissey and his partners opened Saratoga Race Course across the street. He later served two terms in Congress.
At a dinner party in Saratoga Springs in 1868, several sportsmen dreamed up a big race for that year's yearlings, to be run two years later. Oden Bowie, who would soon take office as Maryland's governor, offered to build a new track near Baltimore, and Pimlico opened on October 25, 1870, with the Dinner Party Stakes. The crowd jeered a colt named Preakness, called "half-trained and fat as an ox," who went off at as much as 40-1. He won by two lengths, and in 1873 Pimlico honored him with a new race, the Preakness Stakes.
Wall Street speculator Leonard Jerome and August Belmont built Jerome Park on a 230-acre estate in what was then rural Westchester County, New York. Its clubhouse was built on the order of a luxury hotel, with a ballroom, sleighing, skating and trap shooting, and in 1867 the track hosted the first Belmont Stakes. Yet Jerome Park lasted only 28 years. New York City bought the land and built a reservoir on it, and the site is now part of the Bronx. Jerome's daughter Jennie became the mother of Winston Churchill.
Epsom's fame began with water, not horses. In 1618 a herdsman named Henry Wicker found a water hole near the town, and its strongly purgative water became the source of Epsom salts. Samuel Pepys went to drink it in 1667. Horses were part of the story early: in 1648, during the English Civil War, royalists gathered on nearby Banstead Downs under the pretense of a horse race and marched off with 600 horses, a sign that racing there was already familiar. The Derby followed in 1780.
King James I watched a horse race on Newmarket Heath as early as 1619, but the Newmarket Town Plate was something new: a race run under written rules set out by King Charles II himself in the 1660s. The Jockey Club calls it the first organized race run to an official set of rules and dates formal modern racing from it. It is still run, open to amateur riders over 16. Until 1972 it was the only registered race in which women could ride, and the whole town once closed for the afternoon to watch.
For years people believed Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne was named after an early settler, Robert Fleming. The Victoria Racing Club says otherwise. The road to the course passed through a property owned by James Watson, who named it Flemington after his wife Elizabeth's hometown in Morayshire, Scotland, and the racecourse took the name by the late 1850s. The first race meeting there was held in March 1840, when Melbourne was barely five years old, and in 1896 Australia's first moving picture footage was filmed at Flemington on Melbourne Cup Day.
Hialeah Park opened near Miami in 1925, and after Joseph Widener bought it he rebuilt it with gardens and a lake in the infield. In 1934 he shipped in about 20 flamingos from Cuba. The next day they were all gone, because their wings had not been clipped. Three years later Widener tried again, and this time the wings were clipped. The flamingos became a symbol of Hialeah, and a 2023 Audubon count still found 96 of them in the infield. Widener also introduced America's first saliva test at Hialeah. Thoroughbred racing there ended in 2001.
9The racetrack stables that held Japanese Americans
On the tile: Santa Anita1942
Santa Anita Park opened near Los Angeles on Christmas Day 1934. In 1942 it became the largest and longest-occupied of the temporary detention camps for Japanese Americans removed from their homes. From March 27 to October 27, it held people from Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Clara counties, more than 18,000 at the peak, and over 8,500 of them lived in converted horse stalls. The camp also ran a camouflage net factory. Racing returned in 1945, and some of those stables still stand.
The Derby grew out of a party. At Epsom in 1778, Lord Derby hosted friends at his house, The Oaks, and General John Burgoyne suggested a single race for fillies; the Oaks was first run in 1779. A race for colts and fillies followed, and a tale handed down says the 12th Earl of Derby and his guest Sir Charles Bunbury spun a coin to decide whether it would be the Derby Stakes or the Bunbury Stakes. Lord Derby won the toss, but Bunbury's Diomed won the first Derby, on May 4, 1780.
In a match race, two horses meet head to head. On October 12, 1920, at Kenilworth Park in Windsor, Ontario, Man o' War beat Sir Barton, the first Triple Crown winner, by seven lengths for a record $75,000 purse and a $5,000 gold cup. Eighteen years later, Man o' War's son War Admiral, the 1937 Triple Crown winner, met Seabiscuit in the Pimlico Special on November 1, 1938. About 40,000 people watched, more than 40 million listened on the radio, and Seabiscuit won by four lengths.
The Kentucky Derby's nickname, the Run for the Roses, comes from the garland draped over the winner. More than 400 red roses are sewn by hand onto a green satin backing that carries the seal of the Commonwealth at one end and the Twin Spires and the race's number at the other. The Kroger Company has made the garland since 1987, and it weighs about 40 pounds. At its center, a single rose points upward, a symbol of the struggle and heart it takes to reach the winner's circle.
Nobody knows for certain when "My Old Kentucky Home" joined Derby Day. Churchill Downs believes it began in 1921, when the Courier-Journal described Kentuckians cheering to its strains after Behave Yourself won. A 1930 report suggests that may have been the first year it played as the horses went to the post, and since 1936 the University of Louisville band has usually performed it. Stephen Foster's lyrics were influenced by Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his handwritten draft was titled "Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night."
In 1908, Louisville officials began enforcing an anti-bookmaking law that threatened Churchill Downs. Matt Winn, who led the track, quickly installed French pari-mutuel machines to handle the betting. They were immediately popular, and in later years pari-mutuels replaced bookmakers at all American tracks. In 1911 Winn introduced the $2 minimum bet, down from $5, a sum beyond the reach of most working people. Winn also kept a remarkable streak: he watched the first Derby as a 14-year-old in 1875 and saw every one in person through 1949.
In the early 1980s, Kentucky breeder John R. Gaines imagined a kind of Super Bowl for Thoroughbred racing, one event that would thrill insiders and win over people who barely followed the sport. He set out to convince the industry. Money would come from stallion seasons and foal fees, and big racetracks agreed to wait their turns to play host. The first Breeders' Cup was run at Hollywood Park in 1984, with seven races and $10 million in purses. Gaines was also the founding chairman of the Kentucky Horse Park.
The Melbourne Cup, a two-mile handicap with a rich prize, was first run at Flemington on November 7, 1861, and won by Archer from New South Wales. In 1875 it was first run on a Tuesday, to coincide with the Prince of Wales's birthday holiday. The Victoria Racing Club's founding secretary, Robert Cooper Bagot, lobbied the government to support the race, and Melbourne Cup Day became an official public holiday. In 1985 the Cup became Australia's first million-dollar race.
Charles Strub, a California dentist nicknamed the Advertising Dentist, partnered with film producer Hal Roach to build Santa Anita. When a friend warned that they would not even be able to sell horse manure there, Strub replied, "But don't forget, sir, we shall sell a lot of that." In 1935 the track ran the Santa Anita Handicap for $100,000, the first of the famed Hundred Granders. The winner took home $108,400, and the race became known as the Big 'Cap.
The mint julep, made with Kentucky bourbon, simple syrup and mint leaves over crushed ice, has been the traditional drink of the Kentucky Derby for nearly a century. It became the official drink in the 1930s, when Churchill Downs began serving it in souvenir cups, which it first ordered in 1937. Over Kentucky Oaks and Derby weekend, fans now drink more than 125,000 juleps, which takes more than 10,000 bottles of bourbon, 2,250 pounds of fresh mint and 475,000 pounds of ice.