Description

The Horse God Built tells the amazing and heartwarming story of a Secretariat and the man who knew him best.

Most of us know the legend of Secretariat, the tall, handsome chestnut racehorse whose string of honors runs long and rich: the only two-year-old ever to win Horse of the Year, in 1972; winner in 1973 of the Triple Crown, his times in all three races still unsurpassed; featured on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated; the only horse listed on ESPN s top fifty athletes of the twentieth century (ahead of Mickey Mantle). His final race at Toronto s Woodbine Racetrack is a touchstone memory for horse lovers everywhere. Yet while Secretariat will be remembered forever, one man, Eddie Shorty Sweat, who was pivotal to the great horse s success, has been all but forgotten–until now. In The Horse God Built, bestselling equestrian writer Lawrence Scanlan has written a tribute to an exceptional man that is also a backroads journey to a corner of the racing world rarely visited. As a young black man growing up in South Carolina, Eddie Sweat struggled at several occupations before settling on the job he was born for–groom to North America s finest racehorses. As Secretariat s groom, loyal friend, and protector, Eddie understood the horse far better than anyone else. A wildly generous man who could read a horse with his eyes, he shared in little of the financial success or glamour of Secretariat s wins on the track, but won the heart of Big Red with his soft words and relentless devotion. In Scanlan s rich narrative, we get a groom s-eye view of the racing world and the vantage of a man who spent every possible moment with the horse he loved, yet who often basked in the horse s glory from the sidelines. More than anything else, The Horse God Built is a moving portrait of the powerful bond between human and horse.