Autorentext

Mark Shrager has published some 300 articles about every aspect of horse racing in magazines such as Turf & Sport Digest, American Turf Monthly, and others. His 1974 Turf & Sport Digest article, “1,001 Surefire Ways to Lose a Horse Race,” was published in the annual Best Sports Stories anthology. He is the author of The Great Sweepstakes of 1877: A True Story of Southern Grit, Gilded Age Tycoons, and a Race That Galvanized the Nation and Diane Crump: A Horse-Racing Pioneer’s Life in the Saddle, which won the 2020 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award for the best book on Thoroughbred racing. He lives in Altadena, CA, and is a three-time Jeopardy! champion.

Klappentext

Today’s Kentucky Derby is a multimillion-dollar spectacle involving corporate sponsorship, worldwide media coverage, and an annual citywide festival in Louisville. Over its nearly century-and-a-half history, the Kentucky Derby has grown to be one of the biggest sporting events of the year, attracting 150,000 spectators at the track and nearly 15 million television viewers on the first Saturday each May.

But 1875, the year of the first Derby, was a different time. The Louisville Jockey Club track, which would one day bear the name “Churchill Downs,” was a small structure that might, on its best day, provide seating and standing room for 12,000 spectators. The grandstand was plain and functional and included a section reserved for bookmakers, whose trade was legal and who operated in the open. Perhaps most significantly, the majority of jockeys in the race were Black, in stark contrast to the present-day Derby, where participation by African-American jockeys is rare.

In The First Kentucky Derby, racing historian Mark Shrager examines the events leading up to the first “Run for the Roses,” the unsuccessful effort that the winning owner might have made to rig the race for his preferred horse, and the prominent role played by African Americans in Gilded Age racing culture—a holdover from pre-emancipation days, when slaves were trained from birth to ride for their wealthy owners and grew up surrounded by the horses that would be their life’s work.

Inhalt

Prologue: A Word to the Reader

Preface: 1875 Was a Long Time Ago

Introduction: The Derby or the Bunbury? 

Chapter 1: A Blessed Event in the Bluegrass

Chapter 2: Colonel Clark and the Birth of the Derby

Chapter 3: Three Black Jockeys, Seven Kentucky Derby Wins

Chapter 4: Inauspicious but Promising

 Chapter 5: A Winner at Last

Chapter 6: The Rise and Fall of the Black Jockey in America

Chapter 7: Williamson and Lewis

 Chapter 8: Aristides Versus Ten Broeck

Chapter 9: The Path to Derby Day

Chapter 10: “Go on with Him, Oliver!” 

Chapter 11: Did McGrath Really Lose? A Possible Alternative

Chapter 12: A Pawn In McGrath’s Game? Part 1 

Chapter 13: The Battle of the United States Hotel 

Chapter 14: A Pawn in McGrath’s Game? Part 2

Chapter 15: “Keeping the Books”

Chapter 16: A Lost Season

Chapter 17: Catastrophe

Chapter 18: A Plaque in the Hall of Fame? The Case for Aristides

Chapter 19: Epilogue

Afterword: It Could Have Been Different

Acknowledgments 

Chapter Notes 

Bibliography 

Index