Duel for the Crown by Linda Carroll and David Rosner is a mostly engaging and always informative look at horse racing’s greatest rivalry. If you were around at the time (the 70s) Affirmed and Alydar raced against one another, you’ll be transported back to that time of wonderful excitement. If you came later, than it’s well worth reading the story of how these two colts pulled even non-racing folks into the tracks or into their living rooms to watch them go (literally) head to head.

Most famously, of course, the two battled it out in the three most famous races comprising the Triple Crown, with Affirmed winning the Crown but (outside of the Derby) just barely, as Alydar pushed Affirmed to the limit. The two competed directly ten times, and though Affirmed won a clear majority of those race, few of those victories came easily. In fact, half the races were photo finishes and, in one of the more amazing stats, though Affirmed won all three Triple Crown races, their cumulative separation was less than half a second. Cumulative! To give a sense of just how special both these horses were, how they were truly the class of their year, not only would Alydar have been a Triple Crown winner were it not for Affirmed’s existence, he would have won the Crown with the third best combined margin of victory over the other horses, behind only Secretariat and Count Fleet.

But the book goes into far more that the Triple Crown competition or even the ten races. Instead, the authors begin at the beginning, taking us through their lineage, their birth, their training, their racing, and then what happened post-retirement. We learn of their different personalities (Alydar aloof and high strung, Affirmed calm and downright sleepy) and their different expectations (high for “royal” Alydar, less so for upstart Affirmed).
The authors also weave in the numerous human stories surrounding the two colts, from their famed jockeys (Stephen Cauthen on Affirmed and Jorge Velasquez) to their owners (Lou and Patrice Wolfson for Affirmed and Lucile Markey—“Queen of Calumet” — for Alydar) to their trainers (Laz Barrera for Affirmed and John Veitch for Alydar).
We move back and forth in time as each new person is introduced in present day, and then we move backward to how they started out and then come forward until we arrive back at the present day. So, we learn for instance of how Lou Wolfson, “an immigrant junkman’s son” rose to financial prominence, got taken down by an SEC conviction (strongly implied by the authors to be an unfair one), and then gained redemption via Affirmed’s success. We watch as Calumet Farms is founded and rises to become a behemoth, dominating yearly earnings and breeding lists and winning the Derby an amazing seven times in a 20-year stretch, before falling far and deep into near bankruptcy and then being rescued by Alydar. We see Cauthen learning to ride on haystacks and Velasquez attending a jockey school with no horses where the students “rode” barrels and were taught a “curriculum” based on a series of Sports Illustrated articles. And we get the two trainers, taut Veitch always so close and so sure his horse would break through and the malaprop-prone Barrera, ever frustrated his horse didn’t get the respect he should.

Mostly these stories are engaging and at times entertaining. Sometimes, I confess, the book got a little overly detailed in describing the histories, and the same held true for some of the races. But once we neared the Triple Crown races the pace, appropriately enough, picked up, with the authors telling us just what we need/want to know and no more. The race descriptions themselves are exciting even knowing what happens, and the jockey strategies are fascinating. The writers also do a good job of picking out just the right amount and right type of quotes from those involved, whether it’s another owner deciding he’d seen enough of those two horses and so “I’m going where they ain’t” or Veitch talking about how Alydar wasn’t heartbroken over his losses and that to ensure that wouldn’t happen he’d turned off the TV so the horse wouldn’t see the replays (though he was angry about missing the cartoons.)

All in all, Duel for the Crown is an excellent book even for non-race fans, one that informs and entertains about far more than just the three races. Well recommended.

This is an outstanding history of one of racing’s best rivalries and the sport’s golden age. My younger racing obsessed self would have eaten this up (and much is familiar to anyone who reads deeply about thoroughbreds). I very much appreciated the final chapter where the authors connect their story to the current multi decade decline of the sport, and how self inflicted many of its failures are. There is a reason why even True Fans like myself have drifted away.
As a library purchase, this is a very niche topic that I’d only buy for large or relevant collections.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

Very good read!! As a horse crazy little who grew up into an even more horse crazy adult I really liked this book, it was engaging and informative!

This was a fascinating read for horse racing enthusiasts.. I followed these horses in the 70’s when they were racing, but the background on their owners, riders, and sires added much to my actual memories of two great horses.mmi wish there were more pictures, but overall, this was a really good history of Affirmed and Alydar. Who knew they came from the same lineage? Thanks for the memories!

This book chronicles the rivalry between Affirmed and Alydar during the 1977-78 racing seasons. It was initially published in 2014 and was recently updated to reflect the history of these two horses, their trainers, owners, and jockeys in the interim. I got into racing about three years after the historic 1978 Triple Crown, so much of what was in the book was new to me.