Cover Detail, "Native Dancer"

Native Dancer
Date: 6/7/2003

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Native Dancer's story is full of intriguing elements, as are many stories set at the track. Among the more intriguing elements here is the Dancer's quirky personality: he liked other horses, and enjoyed running beside them rather than in front of them. After he'd built a lead, he'd tend to slow down, relax, and wait for the company to catch up. This inclination encouraged his trainer to teach Native Dancer to run as a closer: a horse that ran with the pack until the stretch, then blew past everybody on the way to the wire. It was a strategy that made for exciting races.

As John Eisenberg points out in Native Dancer: The Grey Ghost, Hero of a Golden Age, this horse would have been a terrific performer in any era, but the good fortune of his owner, Alfred Vanderbilt, was that Native Dancer's great days coincided with the arrival of television in millions of American homes. He was the first horse people who didn't attend the races could see, and because he was gray, he was distinctive on the black and white screen, which turned all the brown horses black.

By the cold measure of numbers, Native Dancer was magnificently successful. He won twenty one of the twenty two races he ran, including the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. He was named Horse of the Year twice, and when he was retired, the $785,240 that Native Dancer had won put him fourth behind Citation, Armed, and Stymie on the all-time list. But as John Eisenberg demonstrates, Native Dancer's more important triumph was in the extent to which he captured the imagination of the public, racing and otherwise. His wins were greeted with tumultuous celebration. His loss in the 1953 Derby was generally regarded as an epic tragedy, or at least a heartbreaking demonstration of one of the ways in which sports can reflect life's inclination toward the perverse, since almost nobody felt the best horse won that race.

In these days of terrific books set in racing (Seabiscuit, which you all know about, and My Racing Heart, which hasn't had the play it deserves, for starters) Native Dancer is a solid candidate for show, and a good choice for rounding out your gimmick bets.