Affirmed and Alydar: Thoroughbred Legends by Timothy T. CappsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
As I read my way through the Thoroughbred Legends series, I sense a bit of a formula for these books about great racehorses. This one breaks the mold in a couple of ways. First, it covers two horses instead of just one. There's good reason for this - these horses were tied together by age and by results. Second, possibly because this covers two horses, the race coverage is not as detailed as in other books. Here, at times, you get just a paragraph or two describing some of the lesser races. I found this refreshing. Instead of filling space describing less consequential races, the author chose to cover the head-to-head races and the races with unexpected outcomes a bit more. Good choice. Thirdly, this one spent about a third of the pages describing the progeny of both Alydar and Affirmed, to really make the case that while Alydar was the lessor racer, he was the better sire. This was quite overwhelming in terms of listing offspring by season, and in many cases drilling down (and up) the family tree to make a point. The point was made, but with an almost Biblical listing of names that wasn't all that fun to read. That dropped my score down. Perhaps a graphic would have done a better job here. Beyond that choice, I found this one of the better ones in the series, although I already was an Alydar fan, and had read of Calumet's issues and Affirmed's demise in Ann Hagedorn Auerbach's Wild Ride: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Calumet Farm, Inc., America's Premier Racing Dynasty .
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