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Seabiscuit was foaled on May 23, 1933, Sired by Hard Tack, a son of Man o` War from the mare Swing On. Seabiscuit was named for his father, as hardtack or `sea biscuit` is the name for a type of cracker eaten by sailors. The bay colt grew up on Claiborne Farm in Paris, Kentucky. He was owned by Gladys Mills Phipps. He was undersized, knobby-kneed, and given to sleeping and eating for long periods.
Initially , he was trained by Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, who had taken Gallant Fox to the United States Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing. Fitzsimmons saw some potential in Seabiscuit, but felt the horse was too lazy, and with most of his time taken by training Omaha (the 1935 Triple Crown winner), Seabiscuit was relegated to a punishing schedule of smaller races. He failed to win his first ten races, usually finishing back in the field. After that, training him was almost an afterthought, and the horse was sometimes the butt of stable jokes. As a two-year-old, Seabiscuit raced thirty-five times (a heavy racing schedule), coming in first five times, and finishing second seven times. These included three claiming races, in which he could have been purchased for $2500, but he had no takers. Still, at the end of the racing season, he was occasionally used as an outrider horse.
While Seabiscuit had not lived up to his racing potential, he was not the poor performer that Fitzsimmons had taken him for or as depicted in the 2003 movie—many thoroughbred racehorses never break their maiden, and fail to win even one race. The next season, the colt was again less than spectacular. His owners sold the horse to automobile entrepreneur Charles S. Howard for $8000. This was no bargain price for a horse.
In 1938, as a five-year-old, Seabiscuit's success continued. Unfortunately, on February 19, Pollard suffered a terrible fall while racing on Fair Knightess, another of Howard's horses. With Pollard's chest crushed by the weight of the fallen horse, and his ribs and arm broken, Howard tried three jockeys, before settling on George Woolf, a great rider and old friend of Pollard, to ride Seabiscuit.
Woolf's first race was the Santa Anita Handicap, the `hundred grander` that Seabiscuit had narrowly lost the previous year. Seabiscuit was drawn on the outside, and from the start, was impeded by another horse, Count Atlas, angling out. The two were locked together for the first straight and by the time Woolf had his horse disentangled, they were six lengths from the pace. The pair battled hard, but were beaten in a photo finish by the fast finishing Santa Anita Derby winner, Stagehand (owned by Charles' son Maxwell Howard), who had been assigned 30 pounds (13.6 kg) fewer than Seabiscuit. eabiscuit's new trainer, Tom Smith,[1] with his unorthodox training methods, gradually brought Seabiscuit out of his lethargy. Smith paired the horse with Canadian jockey Red Pollard (1909–1981), who had experience racing in the West and in Mexico. On August 22, 1936, Seabiscuit raced for the first time for his new jockey and trainer, in Detroit, without impressing anyone. But improvements came quickly and, in their remaining eight races in the East, Seabiscuit and Pollard won several times, including Detroit's Governor's Handicap (worth $5,600) and the Scarsdale Handicap ($7,300) at Empire City Race Track in Yonkers, New York.
In early November 1936, Howard and Smith shipped the horse to California by rail. His last two races of the year were at Bay Meadows racetrack in San Mateo, California. The first was the $2,700 Bay Bridge Handicap, run over one mile (1.6 km). Despite starting badly and carrying the top weight of 116 lb (53 kg), Seabiscuit won by five lengths. At the World's Fair Handicap (Bay Meadows' most prestigious stakes race), Seabiscuit led throughout. |
