Wink: The Incredible Life and Epic Journey of Jimmy Winkfield

by EdwardHotaling (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.25

  This title presents the phenomenal history of an American racing champion who found a new life in Europe. After 22-year-old Jimmy Winkfield won his second consecutive Kentucky Derby in 1902, black jockeys were banned from American racing. Sick at heart, Winkfield began an odyssey that historian Ed Hotaling brings to life in this captivating biography. Finding success in Europe, Wink was a fabulously wealthy member of the Russian aristocracy until the Bolsheviks overthrew the czar in 1917. Leaving Moscow for Odessa with his Russian wife, Winkfield and others continued to race, and then, with the Bolsheviks advancing, marched 200 Thoroughbreds a thousand miles to Poland, surviving on horseflesh. By the late 1930s, he was training horses on the expansive grounds of his villa outside Paris when German troops occupied his house and stables. After challenging a horse-beating Nazi with a pitchfork, he was forced to flee again. Wink died in Paris in 1974, still homesick at 94 for the Kentucky bluegrass of his boyhood. This vivid biography of a great jockey is a revelation.