My Guy Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse

My Guy Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse
by Edgar Prado, John Eisenberg

My Guy Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse
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Book Summary Information

Author: Edgar Prado, John Eisenberg
Edition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-04-01
ISBN: 006146418X
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Harper

Book Reviews of My Guy Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse

Book Review: Gripping story, sad ending
Summary: 5 Stars

It was hard for me to read this book, knowing the sad ending. I'm nuts about animals, and stories about the death of one invariably makes me tear up. I read the ending of Good Dog. Stay., for example, with tears streaming down my face, although it was the story of an old dog that had lived a long and pampered life. Barbaro, on the other hand, dies in pain at the peak of his life.

Author Edgar Prado, Barbaro's jockey, tells this heartbreaking story with skill and compassion. From the moment Prado first sees Barbaro, he is impressed. "He wasn't a sleek and slender classic beauty. He was all jock."

Prado successfully petitions the owners to let him ride the big colt. After a thrilling win in the Kentucky Derby -- with the largest margin of victory since 1946 -- Barbaro is the favorite for the Preakness. But in this second leg of the Triple Crown, the horse sustains an injury, a terrible fracture. By quickly stopping Barbaro, Prado prevents the racehorse from damaging his leg further.

Although at first it seems to go well, the leg does not heal properly. At the end Barbaro is suffering and losing weight. The big horse is put down.

Prado includes 33 color photographs, most of them of Barbaro in his glory days, racing around a track. He seems to be flying, with his feet barely touching the ground. A shot of him the day before the Preakness shows Barbaro in his stall, reaching out his long neck and nuzzling the horse next door.

That one got to me. I cried.

Summary of My Guy Barbaro: A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse

A new superstar appeared on the American sports landscape in the spring of 2006: Barbaro, a three-year-old racehorse, won the Kentucky Derby by six and a half lengths, the largest margin of victory in sixty years. Barbaro's impressive performance immediately stirred talk of a possible Triple Crown. But in the opening yards of the Preakness Stakes two weeks later, the horse suffered a catastrophic leg injury that ended his undefeated career and left him fighting for his life.

Edgar Prado, a native of Peru and one of the world's top jockeys, rode Barbaro to glory and then stood beside him for months as the horse valiantly struggled to survive and millions of fans held their breath. Having ridden in more than twenty-five thousand races over the previous two decades, Prado thought he had been around too long to fall for any one horse, but Barbaro—intelligent, charismatic, and resourceful in sickness as well as in health—stole his heart.

In My Guy Barbaro, Prado recounts his own story, a tale of grit and dreams that moves from his impoverished childhood in Lima, Peru, to the winner's circles of the greatest racetracks in the world, and memorably chronicles his emotional time with Barbaro before, during, and after the horse's breakdown. Their bond was special and immeasurable. With Prado still reeling from a wrenching personal loss, Barbaro lifted his spirits by giving him “the ride of a lifetime” in the Derby. When the tables turned and the horse needed support two weeks later, Prado was there, going out of his way to make a succession of visits to the New Bolton Center, the animal hospital in Pennsylvania where Barbaro underwent more than two dozen surgeries and was ultimately put down.

Barbaro made worldwide headlines for eight months, and now Prado's poignant, clear-eyed narrative takes us where no reader has gone before—onto Barbaro's back in the heat of a race and into the intensive care suite where Barbaro's life-and-death drama played itself out. My Guy Barbaro is a heartwarming, unforgettable story of a man and his love for a beautiful animal and an irreplaceable teammate.

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