"The Great Race"
Barbee rode in "The Great Race". The United States Congress shut down on October 24, 1877 for a day so its members could attend a horse race at Pimlico Race Course in nearby Baltimore, Maryland. The event was a 2½-mile match race run by a trio of champions: Ten Broeck, Tom Ochiltree and Parole. Ten Broeck, the Kentucky champion, was owned by F. B. Harper. Tom Ochiltree, the Eastern champion and winner of the 1875 Preakness Stakes, was owned by George L. Lorillard, an heir to the Lorillard tobacco fortune. Parole, a gelding, was owned by Pierre Lorillard IV, George's brother.
Parole, with William Barrett up, prevailed with a late run, crossing the finish line three lengths ahead of Ten Broeck and six ahead of Tom Ochiltree, which had helped to set the early pace with Barbee in the irons.
An estimated 20,000 people crowded into Pimlico to witness the event.
The event is depicted in a four ton stone bas relief—copied from a Currier & Ives print and sculpted in stone by Bernard Zuckerman—hanging over the clubhouse entrance at Pimlico. It is 30 feet long and 10 feet high and is gilded in 24-karat gold leaf.
George Barbee was inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1996, chosen by the Hall of Fame's Historical Review Committee.
Read more about this topic: George Barbee
Famous quotes containing the word race:
“Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)