European Thoroughbred Horse Racing
In an era when many wealthy Americans maintained secondary residences in Paris, France, and/or estates on the French Riviera, some like William Kissam Vanderbilt, Joseph E. Widener and Ralph Strassburger were involved in the very popular sport of Thoroughbred horse racing and acquired breeding farms in the renowned horse region of Lower Normandy.
In the 1920s, Ralph and May Strassburger purchased a villa from Baron Henri de Rothschild in Normandy's exclusive resort city of Deauville. They also acquired the Haras des Monceaux Thoroughbred horse farm at Lisieux, about 18 miles (30 kilometers) south of Deauville. Their French racing stable enjoyed considerable success at the Deauville-La Touques Racecourse as well as at other racecourses in France and in England. Widely respected, France Galop refers to Ralph Strassburger as a "great friend of France."
To avoid seizure by the Nazis during the German occupation of France during World War II, all of the Strassburger horses raced under the name of a French friend, Mme. de Bonard. Among the Strassburgers' major successes were victories in both the French and British Classic Races as well as in the prestigious Washington, D.C. International Stakes in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Ralph B. Strassburger
Famous quotes containing the words european, thoroughbred, horse and/or racing:
“In verity ... we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One key, one solution to the mysteries of the human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)