Tod Sloan (jockey)

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Tod Sloan

James Forman "Tod" Sloan (August 10, 1874 - December 21, 1933) was an American thoroughbred horse racing jockey. He was elected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1955.

Sloan was born in Bunker Hill, Indiana, near Kokomo, the son of a Union Army soldier. He was a tiny and frail child, and after his mother died when he was five, his father sent him to live with a nearby family. He was still a young boy when he struck out on his own, taking jobs in the nearby gas and oil fields. For a time he ended up working at a horse racing stable in St. Louis, but later in Kansas City was employed by a thoroughbred horse trainer who encouraged him to take advantage of his diminutive stature and become a jockey. By 1886, Sloan was working at a racetrack in Latonia, Kentucky, where trainer Sam Hildreth gave him the opportunity to ride one of his horses. Sloan's performance was not impressive, and his horse finished in the back of the pack. However, he persisted and a few years later was riding at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans, and on March 6, 1889 scored his first win there. In 1893, Sloan went to race in northern California where he met with considerable success. In 1896 he moved to New York City where within a short time he was the most dominant rider in the thoroughbred racing circuit on the East Coast.

It was Tod Sloan who popularized the forward seat style of riding, or the "monkey crouch" as the British called it, when he began riding there in 1897. Initially laughed at, his style revolutionized the sport worldwide.

Despite his many career victories, Sloan said that Hamburg (1895-1915) was the only great horse he ever rode. Sloan took over as jockey for Hamburg when the horse's career was near its end after the three-year-old had been soundly defeated in the Belmont Stakes. Ridden by Sloan, the horse won the Lawrence Realization, easily defeating Kentucky Derby winner Plaudit, and then scored the most impressive win of his career in the grueling 2¼ mile American Brighton Cup.

Such were Sloan's abilities that in 1896 he won nearly 30% of all his races, increased it to 37% in 1897, and upped it to an astonishing 46% in 1898. Racing in England on September 30, 1898, he rode five consecutive winners at the Newmarket racecourse. Returning to England, he won a number of important races, including the 1899 One Thousand Guineas aboard "Sibola" and in 1900 the Ascot Gold Cup riding "Merman." The prestigious Epsom Derby was a race that Sloan always felt he would have won, had it not been for a terrible tragedy. In the 1899 race, his horse "Holocauste" took the early lead, and near the end of the race "Holocauste" and Flying Fox, winner of the Two Thousand Guineas Stakes, were racing head-to-head far in front of the rest of the field. At that point in the race Sloan said he was still holding back on the horse, in preparation for the stretch run, when his horse stopped abruptly and collapsed to the ground with a shattered leg. "Holocauste" had to be euthanized while "Flying Fox" went on to win the race. Later that year "Flying Fox" won the St. Leger Stakes to become the 1899 British Triple Crown Champion. In 1900, Edward, Prince of Wales offered Sloan the job to ride for his stable in the 1901 racing season.

Sloan's success on the racetrack, combined with a flamboyant lifestyle filled with beautiful women, made him one of the first to become a major international celebrity in the sport. He hung out with the likes of Diamond Jim Brady and traveled with a personal valet and a trunk full of clothes. His reputation was such that he was the "Yankee Doodle" in the George M. Cohan Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones and the basis for Ernest Hemingway's short story My Old Man. Although Sloan's racing career was spectacular, it was relatively short, ending by 1901 under a cloud of suspicion that he had been betting on races in which he had competed. Advised by the British Jockey Club that they would not renew his license, he never rode for the Prince of Wales. The ban in Britain was maintained by American racing authorities, and Sloan's jockey career came to an end.

After Sloan left racing, Oscar Hammerstein arranged for him to star in a one-man show in a New York vaudeville theatre, but it did not last. He eventually went to Paris, France, where in 1911 he converted a small bistro into what became the famous Harry's New York Bar (located at 5 rue Daunou between the Avenue de l'Opéra and the Rue de la Paix). Financial problems from overspending on a lavish lifestyle forced Sloan to sell the bar and return to the U.S. His money gone, in 1920 he tried acting in motion pictures, but by then his name no longer had the star value to carry him.

Married and divorced twice, Tod Sloan died of cirrhosis in 1933 in Los Angeles, California, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale. Ultimately, British racing historians restored his reputation, as his betting on races had been a dubious charge at best. He was posthumously inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 1955.

Tod Sloan told his life story in a book titled "Tod Sloan by Himself" that was published fifty-five years after his death in 1988 by the San Diego State University Press (ISBN 0-916304-78-7). Following his death, Beryl Markham received an advance from Houghton Mifflin to write a book on Sloan, but it too was never published because of Markham's own problems.

[edit] Rhyming slang

The name of Tod Sloan left a mark on the English language. His fame spread to London where the name was adopted into the rhyming slang to mean 'own' as in 'on his own'. Hence, someone 'on his tod' is alone. This adoption of a rhyming phrase then the dropping of the word which rhymes is normal. Compare 'Use your loaf' (of bread).