Three Strides Before the Wire


Elizabeth Mitchell went to the 1999 Kentucky Derby and fell in love with the winner, Charismatic. So much so that she decided to write a book.

The main characters: the 3-year-old who also captured the Kentucky Derby Preakness, and Chris Antley, the winning jockey.

She e-mailed me after I did a column about The Ant Man for Suite 101:

"I am writing a book about the people around Charismatic 1999 called 'Three Strides Before the Wire' to be published in June 2002 by Hyperion.

"I am trying to footnote something by you I found online some months earlier and now couldn't find it. I wonder if you might help me. It was a few questions posed to Chris Antley and in one he said how when he was just starting out riding, he watched Willie Shoemaker ride and liked how Shoemaker's valet wore a shirt that said The Shoe.

"Antley wrote down The Ant on a piece of paper and hoped people would call him that. I need to know what the date of that posting was and on what site. Do you remember it?"

Yep, I did. And I e-mailed her what Antley had to say:

"One time Bill Shoemaker was at Delaware Park when I was 16 years old (galloping horses) and I wanted to get his autograph," he recalled while answering messages posted online.

"One of the valets had a shirt that said 'The Shoe' and I wrote 'The Ant' and always wondered what if people started calling me that.

"Then in New York, somehow that is what started to happen. Then when I moved to California, The Ant became 'Ant Man.'"

The author, former executive editor of George magazine, founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., spared no adjectives in her detailed account of "the dark and beautiful world of horse racing."

Mitchell did a wonderful job. According to various reviews that included:

"Charismatic, a colt nobody wanted, is ridden by Antley, a jockey everybody doubted. That either could be a mere mile and a half from winning the Triple Crown would be astounding; that the two of them together are so close to racing immortality would be a figment, a fantasy, a fantastic improbability . . . except that it is real.

"So ran a story in The Boston Globe days before jockey Chris Antley and his horse Charismatic attempted to make history by winning the third and final race of the Triple Crown, the Belmont. After bouts with depression, drug and
The copyright of the article Three Strides Before the Wire in Horse Racing is owned by Greg Melikov. Permission to republish Three Strides Before the Wire in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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