Did You Know?

Gary Stevens and Chris McCarron are both successful professional jockeys, both having won the Kentucky Derby and Breeder's Cup races. McCarron retired a couple months before accepting the role of Charles Kurtsinger.

War Admiral was played by one of his descendants, a gelding named Verboom.

Most of the audience at the Pimlico Race with War Admiral were blow-up mannequins with masks as faces, long sleeve T-Shirts with painted on suits, and plastic hats (which were provided to all of the unpaid extras).

A contraption called Equicizer was used to film the close-up action. It resembled a hobby horse. It was a mechanical horse that had springs, a wooden head and a carpet body. It was affectionately called SS Seabiscuit. In reality, it was a 12 ft by 20 ft rolling platform with a steering wheel in the rear and front. It simulated the rolling action of a running horse and yet it ran on rails around the track. It was powered by a 454 Chevy engine and could go at a speed of 40-50 mph.

The Seabiscuit/War Admiral race originally held at Pimlico race track was actually filmed on location at Keeneland race track in Lexington, Kentucky. The track, as well as some of the surrounding area, had to take on some minor cosmetic changes in order to accurately reflect the time period.

Some of the music in the trailer is from the Medal of Honor videogames.

In the scenes filmed at Santa Anita racetrack you can see a statue of a horse by the paddock. This statue is a memorial to Seabiscuit that exists at Santa Anita. Another statue stands approximately 100 yards away; this is a tribute to George Woolf, Gary Stevens' character in the film.

The 35mm prints of this film come from a digitally grain reduced digital intermediate. As a result they are littered with grain reduction artifacts from start to finish.

While the movie describes War Admiral as being a huge horse close to eighteen hands tall, the real-life War Admiral was well known for being one of the smallest sons of Man o' War. War Admiral was actually the same size as Seabiscuit, which was approximately fifteen hands tall.

When trainers and jockeys refer to a horse having "a great heart" or "a noble heart," they do not mean courage, as we would say about a human. They mean that it has a competitive nature. A horse that has more stamina than speed would also be described as having a great heart (though perhaps more often in steeple-chasing than in flat racing).

When Red Pollard tells George Woolf how to ride Seabiscuit, he says, "Show him the stick at the quarter pole, and he'll give you a whole new gear." To show the stick means to bring the whip, or crop, up close to the horse's eye, on one side, with the suggestion that the next move might be a whipping along the flank. The crop is not meant to hurt the horse, only to say, "Okay, NOW is the time to really move!" Many horses run faster if slapped; others simply freeze and stop running. To show the stick, then, is only a suggestion, and it will make most horses shift into higher gear, if they still have energy left to run for the win. (And animal lovers should note: the horse crop is not used to hurt the horse, only to excite it with adrenaline or (worst case) fear. A jockey who draws blood is likely to be penalized up to the point of losing his or her license, which means no more employment.)