NICHOLAS GODFREY

Weblog: It's a funny old world

Lisa's Booby Trap: the improbable story of one man and his horse

CAN’T find any other home for this nugget from the worldwide web, so this blog is going to be devoted to the racing fairytale that has entranced USracing circles in the last couple of months.

Here’s a warning, though. If you can’t take a bit of schmaltz, switch off now.

Off we go then, with the unlikely story of a three-year-old named Lisa’s Booby Trap, who runs in a turf race at Saratogaon Thursday.

This ungainly filly cost her owner Tim Snyder just $4,500 from her breeder earlier this year, which is perhaps hardly surprising as she is club-footed and blind in one eye.

Even so, that $4,500 was a touch heady for Snyder, 57, “a broke horseman with no horses who was commuting over 100 miles roundtrip to make roughly $50 a day”, according to the Daily Racing Form.

Snyder, who is living in a dormitory room above the Saratoga stakes barn, was working as an exercise rider for trainer John Tebbut, based at Finger Lakes, a couple of hundred miles away from Saratoga in upstate New York but a million miles distant in prestige terms.

Strapped-for-cash Snyder could afford to put down only $2,000 in cash, pledging to pay the rest from her first win.

The vendor, presumably, must have been glad to get shotof the horse, as the concept of any future winnings whatsoever required a healthy dose of optimism.

These were tough times for Snyder, the son of a former jockey. Snyder had trained horses himself, scrabbling around winning cheap races with cheap horses at cheap venues.

He trained for about 11 years before his wife died of ovarian cancer in 2003. Her name was Lisa, and she had told her mother that she would come back as a horse.

Get thehankies ready now. Snyder decided to name the filly he could not afford after his late wife. But only in part.

Put the hankies away again, because Lisa’s Booby Trap is also named after a chain of gentlemen’s club in the Miamiarea where they offer free lunch (alongside full nudity, full friction, full liquor and full bottle service, according to their website).

Be that as it may, Lisa’s Booby Trap still had to be paid for, which didn’t take long. She won her first three starts at Finger Lakesby a combined total of 36¾ lengths.

Because Snyder didn’t have a licence, Tebbut was he trainer of record for the first two.

By the time of the third win, Snyder was back in business with his one-horse team and he decided it was time to try her out in better company with a visit to Saratoga, a byword for quality.

If Snyder was overawed by his new surroundings, Lisa’s Booby Trap certainly wasn’t. Ridden by Hall of Fame jockey Kent Desormeaux, she landed an improbable six-length victory on August 6 in a $70,000 stakes race on dirt at America’s most historic racecourse.

Cue a media storm: movie offers, TV specials and a thousand stories in newspapers and the internet (1,001 now).

Plus there have been some serious big-money offers to buy Lisa’s Booby Trap – all of which Snyder has turned down, despite figures as high as $500,000 being mentioned.

“I know it sounds crazy, but I do feel a connection to my wife through the horse,” said Snyder, speaking to the Saratogawebsite. “Lisa’s Booby Trap could never be a replacement. But I know what I feel, and it’s real to me.

“My wife was a good lady,” he added. “She told her mother the last week she was alive that she was coming back as a horse, and now all this has happened.

“I’m having too much fun with her to ever sell her. I get cards and letters, people send over bushels of carrots and peppermints - I could never have imagined anything like this happening. And now, winning five in a row with her would be something really special.”

Now it’s up to the filly, who faces a decent field in the $50,000 Riskaverse Stakes at Saratogaon Thursday (10.31pmBST, live on ATR).

You know what? Call me an old softie if you like, but I hope she wins.