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About the Book

About the Book

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

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 old tire and a broken fence board, Harry knew that he had misjudged the horse. And so he set about teaching this shaggy, easygoing horse how to fly. One show at a time, against extraordinary odds and some of the most expensive thoroughbreds alive, the pair climbed to the very top of the sport of show jumping.

The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation
by Elizabeth Letts

  • Publication Date: May 29, 2012
  • Genres: Biography, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 368 pages
  • Publisher: Ballantine Books
  • ISBN-10: 0345521099
  • ISBN-13: 9780345521095