Horse Racing

Janet Vokes was working behind the bar in her local working men's club in the small Welsh mining community of Cefn Fforest when she fixed upon the idea of breeding a racehorse. She'd always loved animals, having dabbled in showing whippets and racing pigeons, and her husband Bria...n used to be a rag and bone man with a horse of his own. Why shouldn't a working-class horse take on the high flyers in the rarified world of racing? She bought a mare for GBP350, paired her up with a pedigree stallion and helped to create a syndicate of twenty-three friends from the village - each paying GBP10 a week - to raise the resulting foal, Dream Alliance. He may have grown up on an allotment but Dream Alliance had star quality, beating all the odds to become a winner at a number of world-class racetracks. Then a terrible injury to his leg threatened not just his career but his life. Refusing to have him put down, the syndicate paid for experimental surgery and Dream Alliance went on to not only make a full recovery but win the Welsh Grand National. Funny and charming, Dream Horse by Janet Vokes is the extraordinary story of a woman who defied the snobbery of the racing world to breed a champion, and a remarkable horse who brought a community together.
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Phar Lap remains our greatest, most controversial and most iconic racehorse. In this revised and updated edition, the authors compare Phar Lap and Winx, the two Immortals, from every angle, setting up the ultimate match race.

Sporting genius, icon and legend, Frankie Dettori, shares his remarkable life story in his most personal autobiography to date.

Focuses on the theory, practice, art and science of thoroughbred breeding. This book describes how man came to express pedigree and to develop theories about it, and how practical breeders behaved in the light of their understanding. It also examines the very real progress in kno...wledge since the principles of genetics were discovered.
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Rough Habit An Unlikely Champion is a tale that captures the essence of horse racing - from dreaming to inspiration, to luck good and bad, to fortunes and reputations made. It's the story not just of an unexpected champion horse, but of those who took him to greatness. Rough Habi...t is one in the long line of New Zealand-bred champions who have crossed the Tasman and become dominant figures in Australian racing - think Rising Fast, Redcraze, Kiwi, Bonecrusher and Sunline. Like so many before him, Rough Habit came from humble beginnings, bred as little more than a hobby, via a free service, to an unfashionable imported sire, Rough Cast, from the unraced mare Certain Habit. The resultant colt's stature suggested that the experiment was doomed to fail. His breeder, Isabell Roddick, said of Rough Habit, the foal: He was...probably not the best looking, but I didn't think he was as hideous as he's been made out to be. He was a very small horse. But looks don't tell you if they're going to win a race. Win races he did, 11 of them at Group 1 level, behind only the mighty Sunline for wins at the highest level. He became a cult hero in Brisbane, winning two Stradbroke Handicaps and a record three Doomben Cups. Telling his story in full for the first time is Ken Linnett, winner of the 2018 Bill Whittaker Award for the best book on horse racing in Australia and New Zealand, for his story on Tulloch, the champion of the 1950s and '60s. Linnett has applied the same forensic attention that made Tulloch such a critical and commercial success, to the story of Rough Habit.
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