Thoroughbred Racing's Greatest Day

Perry Lefko

First, be advised: this is not a new book. If you've read Lefko's The Greatest Show on Turf, this is a revised and updated edition to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the first running of the Breeders' Cup. I hadn't read the book the first time around, so I can't compare the two, but take note if you have.

They changed the title, but didn't really make it any clearer: Thoroughbred Racing's Greatest Day is about the Breeders' Cup. Non-fans are more likely to think it has something o do with the Kentucky Derby. Hardcore fans will think any of a hundred days (the Dubai World Cup? Grand National? Melbourne Cup, a national holiday in Australia?), the Breeders' Cup being one of them. The last group are right. Various and sundry stories about specific Breeders' Cup days, specific Breeders' Cup horses or families of horses, owners, trainers, Lefko pretty much covers the gamut of stories here.

It will do the reader well to remember that Perry Lefko is a journalist. He is also unaware that a book-length piece requires a different writing style than a newspaper article. It is best to treat this book as a series of very long newspaper articles; it'll help you get through it quite well. If that were the book's only problem, I'd probably give it an above-average rating and move on. However, the book has a number of errors that it's hard to believe any horse fan would make (most notably, the sporadic misspelling of the names of champion horses, like 1998 Breeders' Cup Distaff winner Escena). While I tried not to let it affect my judgment, Lefko, like most of the rest of the media, is obsessed with the Most Overhyped Event in American History(TM), and in any passage of the book dealing with the 2001 or 2002 Breeders' Cup, there will be far more mention of 9/11 than could possibly be warranted.

Recommended only for already-established racing fans. The rest of you would do far better to start off with something better-written (unfortunately, I'm not familiar with anything focusing specifically on the Breeders' Cup in book form that's better-written); William Murray's The Wrong Horse is a lovely introduction to the world of Thoroughbred racing, as is Bill Barich's classic combination of novel and memoir Laughing in the Hills.