Needles: The Sickly Foal Who Became a Legend

He was born on April twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-three, at Bonnie Heath Farm on State Road Two Hundred in Marion County, and from the beginning no one expected much. He had broken ribs as a foal. He got pneumonia. Veterinarians gave him so many injections in his early weeks that his owners named him Needles, a joke that almost wrote his obituary.

Needles survived. He grew. He became something extraordinary.

Carl G. Rose had come to Florida in nineteen sixteen and recognized that the limestone geology of Marion County, the same formations that create the springs and once held the phosphate, had another advantage. Calcium leaching from the rock into the soil, and from the soil into the grass, built unusually dense bones in horses raised on it. Rose founded the first thoroughbred breeding operation in the region. By nineteen fifty-seven, Marion County had three racehorse farms.

Needles changed the arithmetic. On the first Saturday in May of nineteen fifty-six, he ran the Kentucky Derby. He had been in sixteenth place in a field of seventeen horses at one point in the race. He made up twenty-four lengths in the stretch and won. He was the first Florida-bred horse ever to win America's most prestigious race. Weeks later, he won the Belmont Stakes. He was voted champion three-year-old colt in the country.

The effect on Ocala was seismic. If a Marion County horse could win the Derby, Marion County was racehorse country. Investment flooded in. Within a few years, the county had dozens of breeding farms. Today it has more than four hundred fifty, and the thoroughbred industry employs roughly ten thousand people locally. Marion County calls itself the Horse Capital of the World. It makes the claim with some credibility.

Needles stood at stud in Marion County after his racing career ended. He died in nineteen eighty-four at the age of thirty-one. He is in the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame.