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The Tsar's Jockey: A Novel of Jimmy Winkfield
Paperback
Series: The Winkfield Trilogy, Book 2
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Inkylines & Words
Published: Nov 7 2026
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
They said the Moscow crowds would back him on a goat. The record suggests they were being careful.
The liner comes into Bremerhaven in April 1904 with the rail lined and the languages running up and down it, and the passenger at the stern is a small brown American in a good coat who has been, all crossing, a curiosity for one day and a passenger thereafter. He has two Kentucky Derbies behind him and no country in front of him. Ahead is Russian Poland, a stable belonging to Michael Lazareff, and an alphabet he cannot read.
He learns the new world at a rail before daylight. On the last Sunday of June he walks Hodynka at gray first light and finds what three days of heat have left where only a boot can reach, a seam of honest cushion one horse wide running the length of the backstretch, and he tells nobody, because the man who walks the course owns a race nobody else has entered. He wins the Emperor's Purse for fifty thousand rubles, takes the Derbies of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Warsaw, and finishes his first year in the empire as champion rider of all Russia.
What follows is a decade of fame no American track would have let him touch. They call him the Black Maestro. He wins the Warsaw Derby in a city under cavalry patrol. He wins in Germany. He rides a winner at Petersburg on a collarbone broken an hour before the race, because the filly will face the starter for nobody else. Children fold themselves into his crouch on the fence rails as he passes, and he lifts his cap to every one of them, because a boy on a fence rail was once the whole of his own church.
It costs him a marriage conducted across an ocean in ink that thins year by year. It gives him a colonel's daughter in a dark green coat, the only person at the rail watching the horse instead of him, and a son born in a January snowstorm whose name is entered in three languages the same week. And it ends on the first of August, 1914, on a card the trade throws together in three days, every purse to the mobilized men's families, every rider riding free, run under a headline set in the largest type in the case: THE HORSES FOR THE MEN.
He said all his life that he never once rode for the Tsar. The world had already named him, and it does not give up a good name over a fact.
THE WINKFIELD TRILOGY follows Jimmy Winkfield across three volumes and ninety-two years, from a settlement of seventeen children in Kentucky to the winner's circles of two empires and back to a Louisville front door. The wins are all real.
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