Wink - Ed Hotaling

The phenomenal historyof an American racingchampion who found anew life in EuropeAfter 22-year-old Jimmy Winkfield won hissecond consecutive Kentucky Derby in 1902,black jockeys were banned from Americanracing. Sick at heart, Winkfield began anodyssey that historian Ed Hotaling brings tolife in this captivating biography.Finding success in Europe, Wink was afabulously wealthy member of the Russianaristocracy until the Bolsheviks overthrewthe czar in 1917. Leaving Moscow forOdessa with his Russian wife, Winkfieldand others continued to race, and then, withthe Bolsheviks advancing, marched 200Thoroughbreds a thousand miles to Poland,surviving on horseflesh. By the late 1930s hewas training horses on the expansivegrounds of his villa outside Paris whenGerman troops occupied his house andstables. After challenging a horse-beatingNazi with a pitchfork, he was forced toflee again.Wink died in Paris in 1974, still homesick at94 for the Kentucky bluegrass of his boyhood.This vivid biography of a great jockeyis a revelation.