This guy here with another episode of the History on Plug podcast.

Horse racing was the most popular sport in early America, drawing massive crowds and fueling

a cultural obsession with a horse's speed and pedigree.

In nearly 1800s, every town in America, with a few thousand people had a horse track,

with major cities drawing crowds of up to 50,000. You wouldn't see crowds as large anywhere outside

of something like a presidential inauguration. In the midst of this was Alexander Keene Richards,

one of the 19th century's most significant thoroughbred importers and breeders. Richards was like

automotive designer Carol Shelby,

Matt Damon's character in Ford versus Ferrari,

who revolutionizes the sport by blending innovation

with a relentless stride for effective breeding and training of thoroughbreds.

Today's guest is Gary Odle, author of Reinventing the American Thurrow Bread,

the Arabian Adventures of Alexander King Richards.

We see how Richards traveled thousands of miles on expeditions into the heart of the Syrian

desert to obtain Arabian stock of the furious blood. It became the first American

to venture into the desert to bargain directly with pneumatic tribes and further horses

in order to take the type of horse known for endurance and crossbreed them with American

racehorses, produce racing champions.

The Civil War interrupted Richard's equine breeding experiment. After the war, he was bankrupt

and spent the rest of his life trying to rebuild his thoroughbred facility. But his willingness

to look globally for solutions, traveling to the Middle East for superior boatlines, parallels

today's international talent scouting and cross-cultural exchanges in sports, showing that he left a legacy of globalized athletic improvement that shaped all of America's sports to come.

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