Michael Blowen glanced at the 1977 Sports Illustrated cover of Triple Crown champion Seattle Slew when it arrived in the mail and immediately discarded it. A horse on the cover of such a prominent magazine?

“I thought thinking of them as athletes was absurd,” he said.

Blowen, then a writer for the Boston Globe, accompanied Bob Taylor, one of his editors, to Suffolk Downs seven years later. The visit to the Massachusetts track was life-changing.

Seabiscuit was the perfect horse for his time. He did not look the part of a great racehorse. He was relatively small and knobby-kneed with a laid-back demeanor that suggested he would much rather sleep than step into the starting gate. It appeared he could not run a lick when he dropped the first 17 starts of his career, leaving him as the butt of bad jokes in his own barn.