Železník (horse)
race horse

Železník (29 April 1978 – 22 December 2004) was a Czechoslovak racehorse, the four-time winner of the Velká pardubická steeplechase.
Career
Železník was foaled in Šamorín, Slovakia in 1978. His dam was the Soviet mare Želatina and his sire was the G.D.R. stallion Zigeunersohn. In October 1979, Železník was sold as a yearling for 120,000 CZK to the stables of the Agrochemical Company in Slavkov u Brna. His career started out on the flat but almost ended before it took off – during his first racing season, Železník was injured in the paddock, resulting in a damaged rear knee.
In 1982 he was turned over to a young rider named Josef Váňa, and in 1983 Železník started his jumping career, winning some races that very same year. With Antonin Novak in the saddle, Železník started his first Velká pardubická race in 1985.
In 1987 he was one of 98 horses nominated for the Grand National steeplechase along with another Czech-owned horse, Valencio. Both horses arrived in Britain two months before the race and were to be trained in the South of England by Ben Wise at his Jevington stables near Polegate. However, due to blood irregularities, Železník was quarantined by the British authorities and only Valencio ran.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Železník (horse)” as race horse. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3564546. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 2004, 1979 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Železník (horse)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.