'If You Came For The Horses, It's A Great Time To Be Alive'
American Pharoah and Victor Espinoza basking in the glow of a historic win
I believe there are two things that bring people through the gates of a racetrack for the first time: horses, or people. If you came for the horses, it’s a great time to be alive.
At American Pharoah’s Churchill Downs parade last Saturday, I was honored to meet the colt’s self-proclaimed “biggest fan.” Shaun Basch of Muskegon, Mich., was running on three hours’ sleep when I met her by the paddock, but her eyes were bright and animated, and she had a nervous energy buzzing around her as the hour of her hero’s appearance drew near.
I know that energy well—admiration so tremendous it makes your fingers shake. There are still horses who make me feel that way, though they are fewer and farther between than they used to be. I too, first came through racetrack gates thinking only of the horses. I grew up on a self-engineered diet of The Black Stallion and King of the Wind. I was eager for a hero, and could think of nothing more heroic than a Thoroughbred in full flight, joyfully vanquishing naysayers on the way to the wire. I dreamed of a Triple Crown.
Unluckily for me and other race fans in my generation, we came of age in the sport’s longest dry spell. I’m not old enough to remember Affirmed and Alydar’s iconic rivalry, much less Secretariat’s jaw-dropping 31-length Belmont victory, but I do remember ten of the horses since 1978 who came two-thirds of the way to accomplishing the feat. I embraced them as heroes anyway, covering my notebooks with their photos and boring friends with retellings of their victories when the colts were inevitably whisked away to the breeding shed almost immediately after.
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As I grew up, I shifted from Walter Farley to the writers of Thoroughbred Times and Blood-Horse, to horseplayers’ forums, to whatever racing-related material I could get my hands on. The racing world was not all white knights and shinning armor, I learned. Actually, it was kind of a mess—there were more drug names in a few months’ issues than in any medicine cabinet I’d ever seen, and I learned Ferdinand’s name for all the wrong reasons.
I didn’t stop reading, and I didn’t stop incessantly reminding my middle school classes what time the Kentucky Derby aired each year. I couldn’t forget that horses don’t read papers (or lawsuits, or blog comments). The reason I started watching in the first place was that they really understand just one thing: that there are thousands of years of carefully-chosen blood coursing through their veins, imploring them to run. Maybe, I thought, I should keep reading, keep learning, and find a way to help it easier and safer for them to do that.
By the time Pharoah turned for home June 6, I think I was the only one in the crowd who remained silent and still. I was waiting for some unheralded rival on the infield screen to kick into gear, catch the Triple Crown hopeful, and suck the air out of the lungs of 90,000 people. Again. It wasn’t until the bay horse crossed the shadows of the Belmont track, all alone, that I got goosebumps.
I don’t think I ever believed I’d live in a time where a newly-minted Triple Crown winner was paraded for the public and greeted the press corps outside his training barn, with designs on finishing out the racing season. I never imagined a world where last year’s Triple Crown near miss might feasibly stable nearby this year’s victor while both contend the Breeders’ Cup in the heart of horse country. I would have thought only Walter Farley could’ve dreamed such a thing, but here it is.
Horses like California Chrome and Pharoah became heroes for so many people I’ve talked to in the past year, no matter what their place in history ultimately becomes. There has been and will be a lot of talk about how racing can “seize the opportunity” of a Triple Crown—marketing strategies, hashtags, American Pharoah promotional selfie sticks are all, I’m sure, forthcoming. As they should be. But let’s not forget that the horse has done immeasurable work for us already: he’s made adults dissolve into happy tears, he’s made people drive for hours to watch him walk in a circle. He’s become an inspiration that, for some of them, will last a lifetime.
It’s true that people who make signs and t-shirts for a horse’s parade aren’t necessarily the high-dollar horseplayers our sport needs to make the bottom line—but that doesn’t mean their conversion is insignificant. Our responsibility is not to wave them away as insignificant attendance inflation and it’s not to lie to them about racing’s dark corners, either. If they’re lucky enough to fall in love with a horse once, they’ll keep coming back. Most importantly, they will provide the voice that reminds racing’s management to look through the sea of television ratings and political red tape, (past the people) to remember the horse. And that is tremendously valuable.
