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. And so he set about teaching this shaggy, easygoing horse how to fly. 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. 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.īut Snowman had other ideas about what Harry needed. On Harry’s modest farm on Long Island, the horse thrived. He recognized the spark in the eye of the beaten-up horse and bought him for eighty dollars. 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. They were the longest of all longshots-and their win was the stuff of legend. Into the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and tradition comes the most unlikely of horses-a drab white former plow horse named Snowman-and his rider, Harry de Leyer. November 1958: the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
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