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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\\u2014and transcended his sport on a run of twelve consecutive   stakes victories\\u2014but his quest for the Triple Crown was lost with a third\\u2011place   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\\u2011century   horse racing, from Bid\\u2019s owners, the renowned Meyerhoff family, to Grover   \\u201cBuddy\\u201d Delp, the fast\\u2011talking trainer, to teenage jockey Ronnie Franklin,   whose meteoric rise to fame aboard Spectacular Bid came at the cost of his   innocence and well\\u2011being. Also present are four of the era\\u2019s magnificent   Latino riders, \\xc1ngel 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\\u2019s 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\\u2019s 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.