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Cindy Crank

Everything you knew about the death of champion racehorse Phar Lap is probably wrong.

The Great Depression descended upon the world in 1929, and Phar Lap, a gangly legged, spotty faced horse with few redeeming features made his first inauspicious steps onto the racecourses of Australia. He won just one race after four starts and was the brunt of more than a few jokes.

 Yet, from 1930 to 1932 he would win 32 races including the prestigious Melbourne Cup and the Agua Caliente in Mexico. Just weeks later, the horse who had given people a ray of hope and a reason to smile amidst grinding poverty and unemployment was dead. His demise had all the elements of an international whodunit including possible poisonings and mafia involvement. The suspected causes of Phar Lap’s death have swirled around like chaff thrown to the wind for decades and the world thought they had heard them all.

 Tommy Woodcock, Phar Lap’s groom, had harbored a terrible secret since 1932. When the secret was finally revealed, the tragic tale of Phar Lap’s death had just taken another twisted turn and the stunning revelation shocked and shamed the nation that loved “Bobby” and those associated with the “Red Terror”.

 Nothing in the Phar Lap saga was as it seemed.

Unsolved Horse Mysteries

Phar Lap: The Mysterious Death of a World Champion

Shergar, the champion racehorse disappeared into an ominous Irish fog one February night in 1983 and was never seen again.

 The scenario was something out of a Hollywood blockbuster: The gloomy dusk of the Irish countryside, balaclava clad men, machine guns and the Ballymany Stud, the Aga Khan’s world class farm with a champion inside “protected” by just a five barred gate and a simple latch.

 But this was no fictional movie. This was real life and as Shergar, the Epsom Derby winning Wonder Horse, the Pegasus of Ireland moved about in his stall that night, little did he know the drama that was about to erupt outside in the stable yard.

 Shergar’s kidnapping has baffled the police and the public for over 30 years creating countless theories: Was it the American mafia, was it a man with a grudge against Shergar’s high profile owner, was it Libya’s Colonel Ghadafi, or was the IRA behind the crime to secure more money for guns? And, where is Shergar resting now?: In a bog in County Leitrim, Ireland; on a remote farm near Ballinamore, Ireland, or is he buried in the far east after breeding and creating super horses for a wealthy sheik.

 Besides the kidnapping and the frenzy it created, this book introduces the key players, places, races, and probes the “Troubles” that plagued Ireland at the time and were a key element of this story. And while accounts vary depending on which one you read the results sadly all come out the same: Shergar walked into the fog and disappeared forever.