by ITM Staff
A Boy, a Racehorse, and a Story That Doesn’t End: Paul Halloran’s “Cody’s Wish”
If you know racing, you know this story. If you don’t know racing, this story might be the one that brings you in.
Paul Halloran, longtime turf writer at the Saratoga Special, has written the definitive account of the bond between Cody Dorman — a boy who lived nearly all of his 17 years with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome — and Cody’s Wish, the Curlin colt who became his best friend, his champion, and in the end, his last great adventure.
The book is called Cody’s Wish: A Boy, a Racehorse, and a Fight for Life. PTF sat down with Halloran this week to talk about where the story began, what changed when he saw the connection with his own eyes, and what it was like to write a non-fiction ending that no fiction editor would have believed.
How It Started
Halloran was at Saratoga in 2022 to cover the Forego Stakes. Jackie’s Warrior was supposed to win. Cody’s Wish pulled the upset. “I had at least three hours’ notice on the races I was covering that day,” Halloran joked. A quick turnaround piece became a conversation with Cody’s father Kelly that lasted 40 minutes — and changed the trajectory of Halloran’s career.
There was a personal dimension from the start. Halloran has a daughter, Martha, with profound autism. He told Kelly about her. Kelly sent back a video of Cody telling Martha a joke. “That was pretty much part of the connection right from the beginning,” Halloran said.
By January 2023, Halloran had pitched the book to the Dorman family. “I said, I’d love to do it. I’m confident in my ability to tell the story, but I’ve never written a book. We’ll figure that out.” They did.
What He Saw
The origin of the Cody-horse connection traces to 2018, when Cody served as a Make-a-Wish ambassador at Keeneland. (His actual wish was to visit Bass Pro Shops headquarters — his father is a competitive fisherman.) At Godolphin’s Gainsborough Farm in Versailles, Kentucky, farm manager Danny Mulvihill brought the broodmare Dance Card and her five-month-old Curlin colt out of the stall. Mulvihill had been careful to choose a quiet, laid-back foal — he was concerned the wheelchair might spook a more skittish youngster. The connection was so immediate and so striking that office manager Mary Bourne requested permission to name the foal Cody’s Wish. A year later, the name was made official.
Halloran was candid about where he started emotionally. “I don’t think it’s about being skeptical, but I think it’s reasonable to not fully appreciate it until you see it with your own eyes. You’re like, okay, 1,100-pound horse, 70-pound kid in a wheelchair — please explain.”
Then he watched Kenny McCarthy — Bill Mott’s chief Kentucky assistant trainer — stop the horse on the track on the way to the paddock so Cody could see him. He watched Cody’s Wish lower his head to Cody’s level, again and again, across multiple racetracks and multiple states over the course of a year. “At that point, you really say, ‘Oh, okay. Now I really do get it.'”
Halloran calls it “an inexplicable but undeniable connection.” Then he laughed: “It sounds crazy to say inexplicable because I just wrote 60,000 words about it.”
The Ending No One Would Believe
At the 2023 Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita, Cody’s Wish won the Dirt Mile in his final career start — surviving a five-minute inquiry that had the very real possibility of a disqualification. The racing story was over.
The next day, on the flight home, Cody fell asleep on his mother’s shoulder and did not wake up.
“If you came to me with this ending in a fiction project,” PTF told Halloran, “I would have said, ‘That is so cool, I see where you’re going — it’s too over the top. You can’t do it.'”
Halloran remembered exactly where he was when Kelly called. “I was literally sitting on a plane at LAX, just about to start taxiing. I knew they had a stop in Atlanta and I assumed he wanted to relive what happened on Saturday. And of course he gave me the news about Cody.”
The family had lived with that possibility for just six weeks shy of 18 years. But as Halloran pointed out: “If they were ever going to let their guard down, wouldn’t that have been the time? They just spent four days at Santa Anita. The race, the inquiry, the win. And they had just met Carson Yoast, who’s 31 — so don’t they have to be looking at that saying, maybe we’re going to have our son for a while yet?”
The Story Isn’t Over
A life-size monument to Cody and Cody’s Wish was unveiled at Kentucky Horse Park in 2025. The first crop of Cody’s Wish foals will go through the yearling sales this year and race as two-year-olds in 2027. A movie is in the works. Kelly Dorman appeared on NBC’s Derby broadcast just weeks ago.
Halloran will be signing copies at the Keeneland Library on Thursday, May 22, the new Hotel Thoroughbred in Paris, Kentucky on Friday, two events in the Dormans’ hometown of Columbia on Saturday, and Richmond, Kentucky on Sunday. On Belmont Stakes morning, June 6, he’ll be at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga from 9 to 11 AM. A signing at the Saratoga track during the July meet is also in the works.
The book is available at codyswishbook.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. Signed copies are available through Leonard Lusky at secretariat.com.
“There are a lot of great stories in racing,” Halloran said. “This one is at a different level. I think it’s tough to top.”
Cody’s Wish: A Boy, a Racehorse, and a Fight for Life is available now wherever books are sold.
