Richard Sowers, author of The Abstract Primer of Thoroughbred Racing: Separating Myth From Fact to Identify the Genuine Gems & Dandies 1946-2003, long has enjoyed a reputation as one of the country's leading sports historians.

"I must have been born with a thirst for knowledge about sports," he said. "When I was four years old, which was two years before I could read, I had forced my parents and my grandmother to read my baseball and football cards to me so many times that I could identify every player in major-league baseball or the National Football League simply by looking at his card. My mother claims I had memorized everything on the cards, but I don't recall that being the case."

Sowers, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has spent most of his professional career as a sports journalist. He served as a columnist for two Virginia newspapers; spent five years as Sports Editor of The Gastonia Gazette, North Carolina's largest afternoon newspaper; four years with The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky.; most of an eight-year stint with The Sporting News as its News Editor; served as Managing Editor of a general-interest magazine, and even spent six years as a sports promoter as Executive Director of Public Relations at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Sowers regularly covered thoroughbred racing for more than a decade, first at The Courier-Journal, the Kentucky Derby's hometown newspaper, and subsequently for The Sporting News.

Although Sowers actually has spent more time as a newspaper, magazine and book editor than as a writer, he has managed to write more than 2,000 magazine and newspaper articles and, in addition to the aforementioned publications, has written for such widely diverse outlets as USA Today, The Blood-Horse and NASCAR Magazine.

He is the author of two widely acclaimed books about the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: The Complete Statistical History of Stock-Car Racing: Records, Streaks, Oddities, and Trivia and the best-selling Stock-Car Racing Lives.

Sowers lives in suburban Atlanta.