Archive for June 1st, 2022

Obit watch: June 1, 2022.

Wednesday, June 1st, 2022

Lester Piggott, one of the great British jockeys. I don’t know a lot about British horse racing (or Irish horse racing, for that matter, though I can tell you who Shergar was) but even I’d heard of him.

With 30 victories, Piggott holds the record for the most wins by a jockey in the five British Classics races — the Epsom Derby, the 2,000 Guineas Stakes, the 1,000 Guineas, the Oaks Stakes and the St. Leger Stakes — and he is the last British jockey to win his country’s Triple Crown, aboard Nijinsky in 1970.

“The way he rode, with an unusually short length of stirrup for a relatively tall man and his bottom high in the air, must have made the horses feel there was no weight on them,” Luck said in a phone interview. “People said to him, ‘Why do you ride with your butt in the air?’ And he said, ‘Well I have to put it somewhere.’”
Luck added, “Piggott ushered in a golden generation of riders in Europe; he was the one they all aspired to.”

Kenny Moore. He sounds like an interesting guy: he was an Olympic marathon runner, an early tester of Bill Bowerman’s shoes (which went on to become Nike), an All-American in cross-country…

…and a long-time Sports Illustrated writer, specializing in track coverage.

“He wasn’t a writer of devices,” Peter Carry, a former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, said in a phone interview. “He was a guy with a real literary bent and a real sense of language. He was quite economical and eloquent at the same time.”

George Hirsch, a former publisher of Runner’s World magazine, which Mr. Moore wrote for after he left Sports Illustrated, said that Mr. Moore’s athletic past had enhanced his access to his subjects.
“I can remember when he interviewed someone like Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit,” Mr. Hirsch said in a phone interview, referring to two elite marathoners, “and he would run with them and see who they were in ways that he couldn’t have done if he had not been an elite runner.”

Charles Siebert, actor. Other credits include “Xena: Warrior Princess”, “Mancuso, FBI”, “And Justice for All”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye” (and of course “The Rockford Files”), and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo”.