Thoroughbred racing

There is a certain beauty to a Thoroughbred racing full steam, an animal doing what it was born to do. Every year, the best of these animals (the three-year-olds, at least) come together for the Triple Crown races. These races are an American ritual, attended live and on TV by multitudes. The horse people—the trainers, the breeders, the owners, the whole lot of them—are on their best behavior because their world is on display, and they want it to be entirely the glory of animals doing what they were born to do.

But there is more to racing than that, and a lot of it isn't pretty. In fact, the coverage of the Triple Crown could be part of the problem, a conspiracy by horse people with the willing suspension of disbelief by the fans, to cover up the way things really are.

The industry rallies around these races, and rightly perceives them as a smart way to attract new fans and to remind the old ones of why they love the sport... But there is more to marketing than putting on a good show and the industry would do well by moving beyond its parochial view about what it perceives to be "bad" news. Horse racing is too big, and too regulated, to labor under the delusion that its problems and its villains are the sort of "inside baseball" stories that the rest of the world doesn't need to worry its pretty little head about. And yet the industry is too small, evidently, to sustain a sufficiently independent reporting corps that is willing and able to consistently provide critical coverage of the reasons for the sport's decline.

The Kentucky Derby and the Slow Death of Horse Racing by Andrew Cohen is a balanced and smart look at the sport as it is, and as it should be. If you watched the Derby, or plan to watch the Preakness or the Belmont, you should know what you're looking at. It's beautiful, but it isn't the total story.
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