Seabiscuit Skeptics See Horse of a Different Color

In Kentucky these days, it’s hard to escape the saga of Seabiscuit. Ads for the new Universal Pictures movie about the racehorse flood TV channels. Paperbacks of the book by Laura Hillenbrand that started all the fuss fill supermarket tables.

The book reads like a novel, with characters and dialogue bristling with reality. It tells of a crooked-legged little underdog that became the 1938 Horse of the Year and a hero of the Depression. It describes how Seabiscuit was misunderstood, mistreated and cast off by an elite Eastern stable and bought for $8,000 by a millionaire car dealer from California. How his enigmatic trainer absorbed lost wisdom about horses while working on frontier ranches and Wild West shows and helped Seabiscuit realize that racing was fun. How his half-blind, hard-luck jockey became his kindred spirit.

It’s a great story, and the public seems to love it. But it doesn’t sit too well with more than a few racing skeptics because, well ... they see a horse owned and bred by racing aristocrats and trained by the most successful trainer of his day, “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons. He runs 47 times and never proves much better than a claimer, earning about $400 a start. Then, barely a month after coming to the barn of owner Charles Howard and trainer Tom Smith, he wins a stakes race, then another and another. And he starts breaking track records. He would earn over $400,000 in 42 races in four years and become the leading money-winning thoroughbred of his day.

That incredible turnaround makes skeptics question Seabiscuit’s success -- whether it came not just from a kind of horse whispering but perhaps from something like drugs or other banned methods or devices.

The book and movie never explore that possibility, although the book mentions, in an epilogue, that in 1945, five years after Seabiscuit retired, Tom Smith was banned from racing for a year after a groom working for him was caught spraying an ephedrine solution up one of his horse’s nostrils. The book describes ephedrine as a decongestant; it can also be a stimulant and muscle builder. Smith denied wrongdoing.

The skeptics know that horses have won races illegally long before and long since Seabiscuit’s time, although more media attention may be paid to such practices now. In the last few years, several prominent trainers -- including ones with Kentucky Derby wins on their resumes -- have been suspended for drugging their horses. (The trainers generally denied wrongdoing.) It’s also widely known inside racing that some trainers routinely work “miracles,” improving horses’ performances dramatically after they come to their barns. When it comes to illegal devices, in 1999 a jockey was banned for five years for using a battery to help his horse win the Arkansas Derby. (The horse was disqualified; the jockey denied wrongdoing.)

Seabiscuit works wonderfully as the equine Cinderella that brought hope in a hopeless decade. Book and movie ads call it “the true story.”

For the racing industry, that story is a bonanza. It’s made the sport believe in the future again after decades on life support. Questions about Seabiscuit’s transformation fit neither the script nor the marketing campaigns by the book, movie and racing industries that are now in full swing. Besides, such questions may be only recycled rumors fueled by envy. And they may be impossible to answer 65 years after the facts. Yet with so much being spun from a checkered and cryptic past and proclaimed now as gospel, is it too heretical to raise them before we completely close the barn door on this great American horse tale?