cover image Down to the Wire: The Lives of the Triple Crown Champions

Down to the Wire: The Lives of the Triple Crown Champions

Robert Shoop. Russell Dean & Company, $16.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-891954-55-9

Coming in on the heels of the recent spate of race horse books, this most informative volume details each of the 11 horses to have ever won the Triple Crown. Shoop, a former columnist for The Texas Horse Racing Weekly, begins his book with a brief history of the races that make up the Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes. (The term""Triple Crown"" itself was borrowed from English racing and picked up in 1935 by Charles Hatton in the Daily Racing Forum.) From there, the author describes the career of racing horse great Man o' War (though not a Crown winner) and jockey Clarence Kummer before chronologically and engagingly detailing such horses as Sir Barton (1919), War Admiral (1937), Secretariat (1973) and Affirmed (1978). Rounding out the book, Shoop offers a helpful series of appendices that list each of the horses, jockeys and racetracks.