A Speedy Read About Horse Racing
Funny Cide
By: The Funny Cide Team
Read: 2/2/18 -2/3/18
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Prompt: Book about sports
Library Book
Non-Fiction
From Goodreads:
They had no business being there. They were up against million-dollar horses owned by patricians, oilmen, Arab sheiks, and Hollywood producers. They were ten regular guys, and all they wanted was to win a race. Instead, they won the hearts of America. In 2003, a three-year-old with the unlikely name of Funny Cide became "the people's horse," the unheralded New York-bred gelding who-in a time of war and economic jitters-inspired a nation by knocking off the champions and their millionaire owners and sweeping to the brink of the Triple Crown. Trained by a journeyman who'd spent over 30 years looking for "the one," ridden by a jockey fighting to come back after years of injuries and hard knocks, and owned by a band of high school buddies from Sackets Harbor, N.Y., Funny Cide became a hero and media sensation.
My Thought:
This book was a hat trick of a book for fulfilling my prompts. It was a nonfiction, library book about sports. I’m not much into sports but I love horses, so picked this book about horse racing. I really appreciated that although this was a nonfiction, that it read like a narrative.
Growing up, I read every horse book I could get my hands on but it’s been awhile since I had read one. I liked the refresher course I got on horse racing. Things like what a claiming or stakes races are. But the best analogy about what horse racing was “The Derby horse had to be able to run a mile and a quarter on the dirt around two turns by the age of three. It was a horse equivalent of asking a college kid to play in the Super Bowl”
There were a lot of characters to introduce but the author made sure to take equal time in backstory development for each. Out of all the people important to the Funny Cide’s life, I think that I would get along best with Robin. She’s a horsewoman who could ride anything and she’s a reader. Her first date with Barclay was on a beach where she read the whole time. I also laughed at Jose Santos’ background analogy :“He’d been up and down so many times, he needed a seasick remedy.” The character descriptions didn’t end with the humans, the horses were described too “Empire Maker stared out of his stall, but short and imperious, in a peel-me-another-grape kind of way”
Although Funny Cide only won two legs of the Triple Crown, the book about the amount of luck and work it took to get that far was really interesting; I read 3/4 of it in one sitting. Now I’m craving some Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague or any of the Thoroughbred series.
What have you been reading lately?