The trainer who started both Seabiscuit and War Admiral under saddle has died in the US at the age of 98

Charles Schick, who died on February 11, worked his way from stable boy to trainer, and is likely the last person who worked with both horses.

The two great horses were quite different prospects, Schick said.

Seabiscuit and War Admiral in the Pimlico Special in 1938.

In 1934, he first laid eyes on Seabiscuit, when the horse arrived on a rail car. Schick was 18 and working at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens, New York.

“Seabiscuit looked like a mustang coming out of the West,” he said in a television interview following the publication of Laura Hillenbrand’s 2001 bestseller, Seabiscuit: An American Legend. “I had to keep after him all the time,” he said.

“You liked Seabiscuit for his temperament because he was so lackadaisical, like he didn’t care if tomorrow came or not.”

In about 1935 he moved to Glen Riddle Farm in Maryland, where he first saw War Admiral.

“You could just see the class in that horse,” Schick told the Tampa Bay Times.

Schick spent the years up to 1954 in the racing industry, training several winners. In 1954 started working in the airline industry, until he retired in 1981 and moved to Florida.

He was a regular at the Tampa Bay Downs track, and of his involvement with Seabiscuit and War Admiral, told the Tampa Bay Times in 2003: “I wouldn’t say that actually I was that important. But all I know is, I broke Seabiscuit and I broke War Admiral. And they went on from there.”

Charles Franck Schick (August 29, 1916 – February 11, 2015) is survived by three daughters, six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.