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A review by xterminal
Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing by Elizabeth Mitchell
3.0
Elizabeth Mitchell, Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing (Hyperion, 2002)
No less a personage than Tom Wolfe proclaims on the back cover of this book that Elizabeth Mitchell is the perfect person to tell the story of the meteoric rise of a no-name colt called Charismatic in 1999 from the claiming ranks to missing the Triple Crown by a fractured sesamoid a few feet before the finish line of the Belmont Stakes. Which may well be true. It is unfortunate, however, that the result comes off as an unsuccessful mating between the recent literary smash Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend and the much less-known and much finer Bill Barich book Laughing in the Hills, which remains to this day the finest racing book ever published.
This is not to knock Mitchell's work. She takes the same basic tack Hillenbrand did in Seabiscuit, using each chapter to focus on a specific connection: the jockey, the owners, the trainer, the horse, tracing the history of each as they got closer to Derby Day 1999, and then combining them all to go through the Triple Crown. Where she crosses into Barich territory is in the addition of personal experience, and her own story as it intermeshed with that of Charismatic's connections. These sections didn't ring quite right, for reasons unknown. There are also a number of factual errors therein; most wouldn't be caught by non-racing fans, but there are a few that glare (in one particularly nasty one, jerry Bailey is on a horse as that horse loads into the gate, and around the far turn, said horse is being ridden by Gary Stevens. Not the same guy, even if all jocks look alike to you).
Better to start with Hillenbrand and Barich, and come to this afterwards. ** ½
No less a personage than Tom Wolfe proclaims on the back cover of this book that Elizabeth Mitchell is the perfect person to tell the story of the meteoric rise of a no-name colt called Charismatic in 1999 from the claiming ranks to missing the Triple Crown by a fractured sesamoid a few feet before the finish line of the Belmont Stakes. Which may well be true. It is unfortunate, however, that the result comes off as an unsuccessful mating between the recent literary smash Seabiscuit: The Making of a Legend and the much less-known and much finer Bill Barich book Laughing in the Hills, which remains to this day the finest racing book ever published.
This is not to knock Mitchell's work. She takes the same basic tack Hillenbrand did in Seabiscuit, using each chapter to focus on a specific connection: the jockey, the owners, the trainer, the horse, tracing the history of each as they got closer to Derby Day 1999, and then combining them all to go through the Triple Crown. Where she crosses into Barich territory is in the addition of personal experience, and her own story as it intermeshed with that of Charismatic's connections. These sections didn't ring quite right, for reasons unknown. There are also a number of factual errors therein; most wouldn't be caught by non-racing fans, but there are a few that glare (in one particularly nasty one, jerry Bailey is on a horse as that horse loads into the gate, and around the far turn, said horse is being ridden by Gary Stevens. Not the same guy, even if all jocks look alike to you).
Better to start with Hillenbrand and Barich, and come to this afterwards. ** ½