The Eighty-Dollar Champion Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation

Elizabeth Letts, Bronson Pinchot

eAudio - 2011

November 1958, New York. Into the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and tradition at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden comes the most unlikely of horses—a drab white former plow horse named Snowman—and his rider, Harry de Leyer. They were the longest of all longshots—and their win was the stuff of legend.Harry de Leyer first saw the horse he would name Snowman on a bleak winter afternoon between the slats of a rickety truck bound for the slaughterhouse. He recognized the spark in the eye of the beaten-up horse and bought him for eighty dollars. On Harry's modest farm on Long Island, the horse thrived. But the recent Dutch immigrant and his growing family needed money, and Harry was always on the lookout for the perfect... thoroughbred to train for the show-jumping circuit—so he reluctantly sold Snowman to a farm a few miles down the road.But Snowman had other ideas about what Harry needed. When he turned up back at Harry's barn, dragging an... more