Richard Ulbrich was born in Peterborough, England, in 1931, not far from the heart of English racing, Newmarket, which he visited often as a schoolboy. He spoke warmly of seeing Nasrullah and Tudor Minstrel (a horse which, he said, remained his most visible impression) race there in the 1940s; a time he considered to be the "golden age" of British race-riding, where the great riders Sir Gordon Richard, Charlie Smirke, Charlie Elliot and Harry Wragg stood apart from a coterie of accomplished horsemen.

That nostalgic background created a lifelong love of thoroughbreds that possibly, over the years, resulted in the most compressive study of the history of the horse-racing ever undertaken since Bobinski. His lifetime of research culminated in three acclaimed publications; "See How They Ran" in 1981, "The Great Stallion Book" in 1984, and the ultimate companion volume "Richard Ulbrich's Peerage of Racehorses" in 1994.

Richard dies in October 2016, in Brisbane, Australia, after a long illness.