Native Dancer Read Free Page A

daylight opened to Guerin’s right. He steered
     the Dancer into the opening, loosened his grip on the reins, and shouted at the horse. Back went the Dancer’s ears and out
     went his stride, his reach so extended that, it was said later, you could see the bottoms of his hooves at midstride.
    In the career of every top athlete, equine or otherwise, there is a moment when it becomes clear this is no ordinary competitor.
     For Native Dancer, that moment came in the final two hundred yards of the Futurity. Once he had found running room and accelerated,
     he drew even with Tahitian King so quickly that Arcaro had no chance to react. It almost resembled a deft magician’s trick:
     he was pursuing Tahitian King one second, eyeball-to-eyeball the next. Cheers soared into the air, and just as quickly, the
     Dancer wrested away the lead and took aim at the finish. He had gone from fourth to first in five remarkable steps without
     Guerin even drawing his stick.
    A combination of factors would send the horse’s popularity soaring in the coming months: his prodigious talent; his come-from-behind
     style, which exhausted his fans but left them wanting to see more; the timing of his arrival, at the dawn of the TV age; and
     the sheer humanness he exuded with his limpid eyes and charisma. But of all the factors, none were more important than, simply,
     his color. His grey coat stood apart in any equine crowd, discernible not only to fans at the track but also to those watching
     on TV.
    A fast grey was a phenomenon. Only one of every one hundred thoroughbreds was grey in 1953, and through the years, other than
     a stallion named Mahmoud that C. V. Whitney had imported from England and a colt named First Fiddle that had won some races
     during World War II, greys had not distinguished themselves in American racing. Many horsemen had long considered them unlucky,
     lacking stamina, or even diseased, as the legendary Italian breeder Federico Tesio had written. “It wasn’t prejudice so much
     as a sense of caution and reservation,” longtime
Daily Racing Form
columnist Joe Hirsch recalled years later. “Greys just were different. It was a sense of racism, I suppose.”
    Greys would have disappeared entirely from racetracks around the world in the late 1800s if not for a French stallion named
     Le Sancy, the single horse from which all modern grey pedigrees are traced. Le Sancy’s son, Le Samaritain, won the French
     St. LÉger, a major race, and sired a colt named Roi Herode. After a respectable racing career, Roi Herode retired in Ireland
     and sired a brilliant colt named The Tetrarch, a light grey with white patches dotting his coat. Nicknamed the Spotted Wonder,
     he won all seven of his races as a two-year-old in England in 1913, then was injured and retired to stud, where he sired a
     speedy filly named Mumtaz Mahal and many other winners.
    The Tetrarch restored enough faith in greys to keep the line alive in England and America, yet many owners, breeders, and
     horsemen still avoided them, and racing secretaries were still writing “grey only” races into their condition books as late
     as the 1940s, believing the curios would draw women to the track. Even in the early 1950s, many horsemen still saw them as
     sissified novelties and claimed, only half jokingly, that if you came across a grey or a horse with three or four white legs,
     you might as well cut off its head and feed it to the crows.
    There was no substance to the notion that greys were genetically inferior, of course. Coloring had no effect on a horse’s
     ability to race. The grey tint in the Dancer and others was attributable to a lack of pigmentation in some hairs, leaving
     the coat a blend of dark and light hairs that appeared grey from a distance. Many greys were born dark and died white, and
     spent much of their lives in a state of transformation from one extreme to the other. The Dancer, colored chocolate brown
     at birth, was now a rich dark grey with