had talked his doctors into letting him attend the race on the condition that two of them, plus a nurse, go with him.
They rolled him into Santa Anita. Seventy thousand fans swarmed the plant. Marcela accompanied Pollard up through the grandstand. At the top they stopped. A long catwalk, arching over the crowd, stood between them and the announcer’s booth. The chair would not fit on it. Slowly, painfully, Pollard rose from the chair and limped along the catwalk, pursued by his doctors and nurse.
Someone in the crowd below looked up and recognized him. He nudged another fan and pointed to the jockey, and suddenly the whole crowd was gazing up at him. Someone yelled his name and began to clap. One clapper became two, then three. Soon the whole grandstand was cheering wildly. Pollard straightened himself up and bowed.4
Pollard and Marcela arrived at the end of the catwalk, and the cheering subsided. Everyone must have expected Marcela to drop the redhead off there; ahead of her was the press box, den of the exclusively male radio and newspaper corps. No woman had ever entered it without being summarily booted out.
To general surprise, Marcela strode right in.5 As usual, she pulled it off. If anyone objected to her presence, no one said so; one admiring reporter proposed giving her a medal for bravery. But she didn’t stay long. She had planned to watch the race with Pollard in the announcer’s booth, where Clem McCarthy would call the race for national radio. But she was losing her nerve. The booth was on the roof of the track, up a twelve-foot ladder, but it wasn’t the climb that worried her. She was terrified that in the excitement of the race she would scream into the caller’s microphone.
“I can’t stand this,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “It’s not the race that’s got me at the moment. Waiting for the start is going to be bad enough, but that microphone in there is worse.”
She turned and fled toward the catwalk. Gliding up ahead of her was Bing Crosby, decked out to see his Ligaroti contest the race. The Seabiscuit and Ligaroti camps had developed a lively, good-natured rivalry; Lin Howard had placed a bank-breaking side bet with his father over which horse would finish ahead of the other.6 Bing snagged Marcela’s arm.
“Marcela,” he cooed, “you come right in here and tell the people how far Seabiscuit is going to beat Ligaroti.”
“That’ll be easy,” she replied, relaxing some and turning back to the reporters. “By about a quarter of a mile.” Crosby led her back in and she started up the ladder, the wind snapping her dress around her legs. Somehow, they hoisted Pollard up the ladder. Marcela sat down with him. They tried to distract each other from their trepidation.
At the door of the jockeys’ room, Woolf shed his bodyguards. His mind was full of Stagehand. He made a mental note. Stagehand would carry the same colors as his nearly identical full brother, Sceneshifter, but to enable the race caller to discriminate between them, Stagehand’s jockey was to wear a white cap, Sceneshifter’s a red one.7 Woolf walked down to the paddock, where Clem McCarthy awaited him, microphone in hand for a live interview. All I need is luck, Woolf told a rapt audience.8 Seabiscuit will do the rest.
Howard and Smith saw Seabiscuit and Woolf onto the track, then filed up into Howard’s private box. They would say nothing to each other for the next 121 seconds.
As Seabiscuit broke from the gate, he was immediately bashed inward by Count Atlas, a hopeless long shot emerging from the stall to his right. Seabiscuit was knocked nearly to the ground. As he staggered sideways, Count Atlas sped up in front of him, then abruptly cut left and slowed down, pushing back into him again. Seabiscuit stumbled badly, his head ducking, and Woolf was vaulted up onto his neck. For a terrible moment, Woolf clung to Seabiscuit’s neck, a millimeter from falling off, then regained his balance. As he shinnied back in the saddle, Count Atlas leaned hard into Seabiscuit, buffeting his right side as the field bounded away from them. For a sixteenth of a mile, Count Atlas lay over on Seabiscuit’s shoulder, his head and neck thrust to the left, preventing Seabiscuit from moving up. Woolf was enraged. Seabiscuit was struggling to push Count Atlas off of him, the front-runners were disappearing in the distance, and his chances of winning were all but dashed.
Swinging his whip high in the air, Woolf walloped it down as hard as he could on the buttocks of Count Atlas’s jockey, Johnny Adams, then lifted it up and smacked it down again. Down on the rail, obscured by the pack of horses, he could not be seen by the stewards or the crowd. But Adams, who would ride back to the scales sporting angry welts, certainly felt it. He jerked Count Atlas’s head to the right. Seabiscuit broke free.
Finally back in his stirrups and straightened out, Woolf despaired over his position. Seabiscuit was in twelfth place, eight lengths behind the leaders. He was trapped in a pack of stragglers. Woolf had no option but to wait for a hole to break ahead of him. He sat still, his eyes pinned on the white cap bobbing ahead.
On the backstretch, a slender, jagged avenue through a cluster of horses opened before him. Woolf saw the white cap slipping out of reach and feared that this narrow path would be his only chance to break loose. With horses surging in and out, it was likely to vanish in an instant. To seize this opportunity, Woolf would have to reach for everything Seabiscuit had. Accelerating hard under high weight burns vast reserves of energy. Horses carrying the kind of weight Seabiscuit was packing cannot afford to lose momentum. If Woolf sent his mount to top speed, he knew he was going to have to keep him going until the end of the race. A general rule of racing is that virtually no horse can sustain his maximum speed for more than three eighths of a mile. The Santa Anita Handicap was a grueling mile and a quarter, and Seabiscuit still had more than three quarters of a mile to go. Woolf faced a critical decision. If he took the lane opening ahead of him, Seabiscuit would almost certainly become exhausted in the homestretch, leaving himself vulnerable to closers. If he waited, Stagehand might be long gone by the time he launched his bid. Woolf made his choice. He pointed Seabiscuit’s nose at the gap and asked him to go through.
The response was explosive. Pent up from trailing the field, Seabiscuit spun through the gap like a bullet rifling down a barrel. Woolf balanced over his neck and steered him deftly through the pack, on the hunt for the white cap. The quarters were so close and the speed so high that the jockey had to cut sharply in and out to avoid running up into the hind legs of horses. As Seabiscuit streaked past the three-quarter pole, several clockers saw what was happening and jammed their thumbs down on their stopwatches. In the announcer’s booth, McCarthy caught sight of the horse. “Seabiscuit! He’s coming through! He’s cutting the others down like a whirlwind!”
Woolf rolled up alongside the jockey in the white cap. He didn’t have a chance to look at him. Seabiscuit was moving so fast that the jockey and his mount were behind him in an instant. Seabiscuit overtook a pack of horses and stretched out for front-running Aneroid, his last obstacle. The two ran side by side. They flew to the quarter pole, still sustaining a fearsome clip. The clockers banged their thumbs down on their stopwatches. The hands stared back at them: 44?.
In the middle stage of a grueling distance race, Seabiscuit had broken the half-mile world record by two seconds, the equivalent of more than thirteen lengths.9 It may be the greatest display of raw speed ever seen in Thoroughbred racing.
Scorching around the far turn, Seabiscuit had the lead. The crowd was on its feet. Woolf had gambled everything, and it seemed to have worked. The field was in disarray behind him, dropping back in an undulating
