In January 2020, I started writing Foxes of Belair full time. Now, over two years later, I am counting down to the book’s publication in 2023, but, first, I thought I would share a bit about both the book and myself.

The Author

My name is Jennifer Kelly. I have been a horse racing fan since I was about ten years old, after falling in love with the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley. My first trip to the racetrack happened to be to the now-defunct Birmingham Race Course, where Larry Collmus, Donna Barton Brothers, and Steve Asmussen all made stops early in their career. It was the combination of that day of live racing and the immortal Triple Crown season of 1989, where Sunday Silence and Easy Goer battled their way through those historic races, that made me fall in love with racing for good.

I was hooked. But working in the sport was only a dream — until about 2013. After nearly a decade of teaching writing classes at a local university, I got the idea to write a book on America’s first Triple Crown winner, Sir Barton. It took another year of struggling to balance writing the book with teaching before I finally elected to change careers and focus on becoming a turf writer.

When I started working on Sir Barton and the Making of the Triple Crown full time in 2014, I knew I wanted to continue working with the history of the Triple Crown, but I didn’t know what I would do next. As I wrote my book proposal for Sir Barton, I went through the list of books on the thirteen Triple Crown winners and noted that several had not yet had books written about them yet. Two of those were Gallant Fox and Omaha, our second and third Triple Crown winners. I was surprised to find that no one had written about those two, especially given their breeder/owner William Woodward’s massive influence on the sport in the 1930s.

Of course, as soon as I typed the final words on the manuscript for Sir Barton, I put the plan to write Foxes of Belair into motion. I started with three sample chapters for the book proposal and those three chapters were expanded and revised for the final manuscript. Then, after the conclusion of my 2019 book tour in support of Sir Barton, I laid the groundwork to write about Gallant Fox, Omaha, and the men behind them, including both William Woodward and legendary trainer “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons.

The Book

The goal behind Foxes of Belair was to tell the story of these two Triple Crown winners, who were bred and owned by the same man and trained by a Hall of Fame legend. Despite being father and son, they had very different stories: Gallant Fox in his time was an undefeated superstar while Omaha was a throwback to horses of previous generations, one that savored the distance races that have fallen out of favor here in the United States. Both horses influenced how we see the Triple Crown, giving it a boost in prestige. Sir Barton had done it first a decade earlier, but it did not have the cachet it would have in the 1930s as first Gallant Fox, then Omaha, and later War Admiral added their names to the list.

At the same time, the successes of these two horses help make William Woodward’s Belair Stable the dominant force in the sport during this era. Sure, you had names like Seabiscuit dominating the headlines as well, but it was the combination of Woodward’s breeding and Fitzsimmons’s training that put them in classic winner’s circles multiple times over the decade. Their success was a precursor to that of Calumet Farm in the 1940s. The same year that Gallant Fox notched his Triple Crown, Woodward became the chairman of the Jockey Club, influencing the business side of the sport for two decades.

These are just a few of the topics that Foxes of Belair touches on within its pages. Nearly two years’ worth of research and writing has gone into this look at Gallant Fox and Omaha, combing every corner of newspaper archives, the Keeneland Library, the Kentucky Derby Museum, and more. I look forward to sharing more about the book, the horses of Belair Stable, and the people and horses that make up this wonderful sport over the next few months.