Racing Besmirched By The Ignorants

Commenters on NPR bash racing. A small response is in order.

Horse racing is one of the most exciting, emotion filled spectacles in western culture. There are very few places in western culture where the highs and lows of life are in such close juxtaposition like the racetrack. It is a thrilling juxtaposition. This is the place in sport where the working classes and upper classes meet. The sport can be elegant as a designer hat on Derby day yet as repugnant as a degenerate yelling obscenities after another losing wager. In between these two polar opposites lies the most complex, greatest games known to man.


Racing is not a safe middle of the road endeavor, while the horses are treated well they are pushed hard to perform. The sport certainly has its seedy side. However racing is not alone in having a seedy side as does coffee, energy production, illegal restaurant dishwasher help and the illegal alien nighttime cleaners at wholefoods where you dispense your brie and chablis. However the other side of the coin is that the vast majority of the horses receive the best care in the domestic animal world. These horse lead of life of luxury complete with daily sponge bathes and comprehensive medical care.

The sport is enjoying a modest revival. Those looking for something truly real are finding racing is the only truly real sport. Like the multitudes of hipsters that move to New York to find something real, people are identifying racing as something real. Racing is not the prepackaged, master planned entertainment so typical of modern sports today. Racing is a chaotic endeavor that is left to its own devices sometimes producing extraordinarily exciting or disappointing results. Racing is like New York before it was touched by corporate America. Racing is the New York of sports. If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. It is gritty, edgy, elegant, brutal yet cultured and filled with raw life enriching energy.


For those intelligent enough to understand the game, it is a great joy to follow these animals. To know them and to know them well is to peer into natures blueprint. The form of the thoroughbred is the most divine expression of molecular harnessed ATP energy. The horses are efficient vessels of unbridled power, dealers of speed and adrenalin. It is disappointing to read the words of horse racing ignorant people besmirching a game that is complex with a long history as simple animal abuse. This is like writing off New York as a dirty, smelly, crime filled hole after making a cursory visit to the Port Authority bus terminal.