Tod Sloan

Although he competed in one of the non-medal shooting events at the 1900 Olympic Games, Tod Sloan was far better known as the first American jockey to win one of the five British Classic horse races, as he won the One Thousand Guineas in 1899. A small and frail child, he eventually found employment with a horse trainer in Kansas City, who encouraged him to make use of his small stature to become a jockey. From 1893 onwards he found success in California and, moving to New York he dominated racing on the east coast, winning one third of all his races between 1896 and 1898.

At the end of 1898 he was sponsored to move to England and began to encounter success when he won five successive races on the same day at the prestigious Newmarket racecourse. He won the One Thousand Guineas on Sibola and was leading the Epsom Derby on Holocauste when his horse stumbled, fell and had to be euthanized after shattering his lower leg. The following year he won the Ascot Gold Cup riding for Lily Langtry, the Prince of Wales’ mistress.

Sloan led a flamboyant lifestyle and mixed with some of the more colourful characters in British and American high society. Allegations soon surfaced that he had bet on some of his own races and by the end of 1901 his ban from horse racing in Britain had been upheld in the USA, although the evidence of his guilt was not compelling. The composer Oscar Hammerstein arranged for him to star in a one man Vaudeville show but it was not successful and Sloan decamped to Paris, where he owned and ran “Harry’s New York Bar” in one of the city’s more fashionable areas.

He returned to the States and had a brief career in silent movies. Sloan died at the age of 59 in 1933 due to the effects of his alcoholism. His inspiration was such that Ernest Hemingway used him as the basis for his short story “My Old Man” and composer George Cohan reinvented him as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” in his musical “Little Jimmy Jones”. In 1942 Cohan was portrayed by Jimmy Cagney in his guise as “Yankee Doodle”