Races and Racecourses Books

this book had me looking foward to reading page to page-didn't want the book to end...

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This book is a must have. It takes a look back at some of the greatest moments of Saratoga's top class racing. It is written so well, that you can not put the book down even if the president of the United States called. I strongly advise you buy this book because, if you don't, you will miss a once in a lifetime reading opportunity.

Bill Heller, Graveyard of Champions: Saratoga's Fallen Favorites (Eclipse Press, 2002)
There are few things in racing that one can count on. Churchill Downs (and certain other tracks) are notorious horse-for-course tracks, and you can count on a parade of longshots the crowd ignores who have previously raced well over the track. Artificial surfaces and speed biases do not mix. Horse owned by the Sheikhs will be retired at the end of their three-year-old seasons. These things just happen, as regular as clockwork.

There's another one, the oldest of them all: odds-on favorites in graded stakes races will fall at Saratoga. And you know what they say about the bigger and the harder. Hardly a year has gone by (if one ever has) where at least one odds-on favorite hasn't delivered the goods at the Spa. Sometimes they lose by a nose, sometimes they finish dead last, but they all have one thing in common: they don't win. The roster of horses who have dropped the bit, sucked dirt, bid and hung, flattened, fell victim to a cuppy track, whatever your euphemism is, and the roster of America's greatest horses sure does have a lot of overlap in it. The two best horses in the history of American racing both got stomped at Saratoga, both by horses who never did a damned thing otherwise. That's the stuff legends are made of.

Bill Heller attempts to make sense of the legend, applying some research and codification to the track tales. And you know what he found out? There really is some kind of a jinx on top-class horses at Saratoga. He runs a list (how comprehensive it is, I don't know) at the back of this book of odds-on favorites who have failed in stakes races at Saratoga over the years. It's a long, long list, and it looks a lot longer when you remember that Saratoga's meet runs three to five weeks every year. A list this long at someplace like Calder or Thistledown, tracks that run nine months of every year, wouldn't be a big thing. But Saratoga?

The book is more a collection of articles than a book, really; the stories of some of those favorites and the races in which they failed. If you like really good descriptions of races past, there are few better at writing those descriptions than Bill Heller. It's hard to make a description of a harness race pulse-pounding, but Heller's recounting of "the weirdest race in Saratoga Harness history" works, and it works well. (The accompanying photo is terrifying. It's hard to believe anyone, or anything, survived, much less that both horse and driver walked away almost uninjured. Even more so when you realize that harness horses do this sort of thing far more rarely than thoroughbreds.) And, of course, it would be hard to not recount Secretariat's losses to Prove Out and Onion, or Man o' War's to Upset, and not captivate readers.

What seemed to be missing, to me, was a greater sense of unity than just "look at how these horses fared." A couple of summary chapters that took a more statistically-minded approach would have been an excellent addition here, a closer look at the bigger picture before (or after) the individual stories. But this is not to take away from those individual stories, which are classics. *** ½

I found this book a very exciting read for anybody in horse racing. This book is suitable for fans, horseman, and executives. Saratoga has a long history as the place where many great horses have been sent to the "Graveyard". This book is well detailed, filled with facts, and contains quotes from people who have played a strong role at Saratoga. This book is as great as the track itself.