These actors are thoroughbreds, and you may find yourself wishing that Ross would open up and let them run. From time to time, Seabiscuit does shake off its air of sober restraint. The racing scenes are crisply edited and genuinely exciting, especially the climactic one-on-one grudge match between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, the Triple Crown winner whose owner, in black suit and bowler hat, represents East Coast plutocracy against Howard's self-made Western man of the people.
The rivalry between these two horses was itself a kind of class war: although Seabiscuit set speed records in a string of victories out West, he was, to the Eastern racing establishment, a "glorified plater," too old and obscure to compete in their hallowed venues. Howard's relentless media campaign was ultimately successful, but Pollard suffered a calamitous injury shortly before the race. His friend and sometime rival, George Woolf (played by Gary Stevens, a real-life Hall of Fame jockey), rode Seabiscuit in front of 40,000 spectators at Baltimore's Pimlico racetrack.
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