05/22/2024
What a perfect horse!!!
SEABISCUIT
The train sighed into Tanforan on a cool Wednesday morning in November 1936. Seabiscuit clopped onto the unloading ramp and paused halfway down, looking over his new home state. There wasn’t much to see. The California sunlight had the pewter cast of a declining season. One or two stable hands crisscrossed the tamped-down earth before the siding. Horses murmured over the grounds.
A couple of reporters stood around, looking indifferently at Howard’s new horse. They knew that the c**t was aiming for the February 27 Santa Anita Handicap, but he hadn’t done enough to merit serious consideration. Their thoughts were occupied by weightier names: world-record holder Indian Broom; speed demon Special Agent; and above them all, the magnificent Rosemont, king of the East and conqueror of 1935 Triple Crown winner Omaha. Eastern horses rarely came to the West in those days, but the size of the purse had brought Rosemont over the Rockies. With Rosemont in the race, no one had any reason to believe that the horse Tom Smith was leading down the platform would be anything more than an also-ran.
The reporters jotted down a word or two on Seabiscuit’s arrival and moved off. Smith settled the horse in a comfortable stall and retired to his own little room right above it.
Smith liked the anonymity. The New York trip had told him that he had a very good horse in his barn, and until the weights were assigned for the hundred-grander, he intended to keep him hidden. So the trainer tucked Seabiscuit away on the Tanforan backstretch. He didn’t even let his stable hands know how good he thought the horse was. Quietly, slowly, he schooled the horse, fed him well, built his trust. Seabiscuit’s ribs filled out—he had put on two hundred pounds in the three months since he had joined Smith—and his manners had improved. When he came out on the track, he bounced up and down in eagerness to get going. Smith knew Seabiscuit was improving rapidly, but when he sent him out for workouts before the track clockers, he gave him only easy gallops that veiled his speed. No one took much notice of him.
One afternoon when the track was deserted, Smith snuck him out. Smith and Pollard had stripped away the temperamental barriers. It was time to see how fast the c**t could go. Smith loaded weight onto his back, boosted an exercise rider aboard, and turned him loose.
He watched as Seabiscuit’s body flattened down, his speed building, humming over the rail. Smith ticked off the seconds in his head. Something is happening. Lacking competition, racehorses in workouts rarely approach the speeds they achieve in races. But Smith had never seen a horse—any horse—flash this kind of speed, not in a workout, not in a race. Perhaps Smith thought his eyes were failing him, the clock in his head winding out of time. Coming up, a mile to go. He pulled his stopwatch out and pumped the trigger as the horse ripped past the marker. Seabiscuit kept rolling, faster and faster, covering more than fifty feet per second. His trainer watched intently, the surprise of it pushing up through him. Seabiscuit’s speed was not flagging. A thought drummed in Smith’s mind: He’s burning the top right off the racetrack. Seabiscuit banked into the turn. There was a supple geometry to his arc, a fish bending through a current. Where virtually all horses decelerate and often drift out as they try to negotiate corners, Seabiscuit was capable of holding a tight line while accelerating dramatically. No horse has ever run a turn like this one.
When the c**t flashed under the wire, Smith looked down at his hand. Seabiscuit had worked a mile in 1:36. The track record was 1:38. At that speed, Seabiscuit would have trounced the track record holder by more than a dozen lengths.
Tom Smith was wide awake. In sixty years lived alongside thousands of horses, he had never seen anything like this. It was no fluke: in another clandestine workout not long after, the c**t would tie a thirty-year-old world record for seven eighths of a mile, running it in 1:22.
Smith took Seabiscuit back to the barn, his secret seething in his head. For the first time, he grasped the awesome responsibility that lay in his hands.
The old cowpuncher was scared to death.
by~
LAURA HILLENBRAND
