Tom Humphries/Locker Room: A couple of years ago my friend Paul Kimmage departed for London with best wishes in his pocket. He was headed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Awards and we were quietly confident that his collaboration with Tony Cascarino would yield the big prize.

Instead, news came through that some American book about a horse had come from nowhere to win.

This was perplexing and made more so by the news that the author of the book about the horse would not be hitting London on the razz with her prize cheque. She wouldn't be hitting anywhere. She was frail and sickly and it was whispered on death's door.

We went away and read her book about the horse. It's fair to say that it dismounted us from our complacency. Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand, is a wonderful, lyrical read and a great story runs through it.

Seabiscuit, (the book and the movie) transpired to be every hack's dream.

Late at night you are flicking through some old papers and stuff, you come across a picture of an old jockey called Red Pollard. He has a curiously wistful face and peers out of history over the neck of a horse.

You look a little further and Red Pollard turns out to be sitting atop a bona fide story. Seabiscuit won't be the first book written about the wonder horse, or the first movie made about him but in your head you know you can tell this forgotten tale better than anyone else ever has. You do and the book sits on the New York Times best sellers list for 70 weeks and counting and the movie does your book credit.

In the sports department of The Irish Times we used to have a little joke that those of us crossing the bridge from hard scrabbling freelance days to the cushioned world of a staff job were prone, on arrival, to suddenly come down with chronic fatigue syndrome.

Where once a young hack needed to write as many pieces as possible in a week, suddenly he or she could find that writing was a deeply exhausting endeavour and being asked to travel and write was completely draining.

It turned out that Laura Hillenbrand wrote Seabiscuit through four painful years suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. If she hit the jackpot in journalism terms she deserves it. Her story is in itself a movie waiting to be made.

Riding in a car somewhere in Ohio 16 years ago , travelling back to college with two friends she had a flashing vision of a deer on the road.

She thought that the car she was in had hit the animal but her companions had seen nothing.

That was the start of it though. By the time they reached college she was a very sick woman. Nausea gave way to chills and hot flushes. She couldn't eat, couldn't rise from the bed, couldn't concentrate. After three weeks she had to quit college.

She wrote down her story for the New Yorker magazine earlier this year and when you set Laura Hillenbrand's triumph over 16 years of suffering against the quirky long-odds wins of her subject Seabiscuit, there's no contest in terms of romance.

Her condition imprisoned her. A walk down the block could cost her weeks in bed. Every movement was a calculated decision. Three years after the condition brought her down she began to feel stronger and wrote to a friend about the sensation of growing younger.

In the summer of 1991 she miscalculated and rode a nice summers day to its limits. She started the day as a happy passenger in a 10-hour drive to Saratoga Springs racecourse, the entire pilgrimage being an escape from confinement.

She ended the day unable to swallow, sliding in and out of delirium. Then the illness really began to kick her around.

"The smallest exertion plunged me into a 'crash'. First my legs would weaken and I'd lose the strength to stand, then I wouldn't be able to sit up.

"My arms would go next and I'd be unable to lift them. I couldn't roll over. I would lose the strength to speak. Only my eyes were capable of movement. At the bottom of each breath I would wonder if I'd be able to draw the next one."

From the bottom of that condition, from a pit which must have been adjacent to insanity, Laura Hillenbrand began to work.

She'd write magazine articles on horses, able to put down a paragraph or two a day before the room started to spin and she'd have to close her eyes. It would take six weeks to write 1,500 words but adding a paragraph to the previous day's words was something to live for.

In 1996, she found the story of Seabiscuit and the unlikely characters behind him. Red Pollard, a broke down, one-eyed jockey with too much weight but perfect intuition. Charles Howard, the owner, a hucksterish former bicycle repairman and Silent Tom Smith, the trainer.

A feature piece grew into a book commission from Random House. Laura Hillenbrand couldn't travel further than her local library for research purposes but she compensated with hundreds of phone interviews and thousands of Internet searches.

She couldn't look down at her work while she was writing or the room would start to spin, so she perched a laptop high on a pile of books and rigged a little device to hold documents vertically for her. When she'd get too dizzy to write with her eyes open she would close her eyes for a while and then write with them shut.

The rest of it is a happy tale but should be happier. The book went off to Random House in the autumn of 2000 and was released the following spring. Instantly it was a best seller, the sort of bestseller that Hollywood quickly sniffs in the air.

The movie, which is, apparently, a thing of some beauty in its own right, canters onto our screens quite soon. It climaxes with Seabiscuit's epic head-to-head battle with War Admiral on November 1st, 1938. You don't need to be told who wins.

It's a story made for Hollywood. What will strike you is that, Hollywood apart, they don't make sports stories with that kind of uplifting innocence anymore. Hollywood does but sport doesn't. The race was a battle between east coast and west, between cold efficiency and pure romance, between swoosh and grit.

In America, the movie has even caused a little spike in the nation's interest in horse racing, a sport which was becoming dusty and neglected.

Hopefully the re-enactment of that famous day at Pimlico will sell truckloads of extra books for Laura Hillenbrand as well. Something about her story refutes the notion that romance and efficiency are competitors, something in that back story of hers redefines the whole idea of long odds and success against them.

See the movie. Buy the book.