The Fast Ride: Spectacular Bid and the Undoing of a Sure Thing

In an era of spectacular thoroughbreds, Spectacular Bid was perhaps the most exalted racehorse of them all. In 1979 he won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes—and transcended his sport on a run of twelve consecutive stakes victories—but his quest for the Triple Crown was lost with a third-place finish in the Belmont Stakes due to a series of bizarre events that have never been accurately reported.

In The Fast Ride, Jack Gilden tells the story of what really happened that day the Bid lost the biggest race of his life. Along the way, he introduces the reader to a cast of characters from the gilded age of late twentieth-century horse racing, from Bid’s owners, the renowned Meyerhoff family, to Grover “Buddy” Delp, the fast-talking trainer, to teenage jockey Ronnie Franklin, whose meteoric rise to fame aboard Spectacular Bid came at the cost of his innocence and well-being. Also present are four of the era’s magnificent Latino riders, Ángel Cordero Jr., Jacinto Vasquez, Georgie Velasquez, and Ruben Hernandez, who all felt the sting of rejection and bigotry during their long careers even as they found their way and raised the level of competition to a feverish pitch.

Underlying Spectacular Bid’s saga was a thin line between hard work and excess, including substance abuse, animal manipulation and doping, and race fixing. Hardly anyone in the horse’s circle made it out unscathed or undamaged.

The Fast Ride is the story of a great racehorse, unfulfilled dreams, the exhilaration and steep price of striving at all costs, and an American era in which getting everything you ever wanted could be the most empty and unfulfilling sensation of all.

 
 

Jack Gilden is a past winner of the Simon Rockower journalism award. He is the author of Collision of Wills: Johnny Unitas, Don Shula, and the Rise of the Modern NFL (Nebraska, 2018). He also consults for businesses about their messaging and teaches journalism and composition at the college level.