Basil Kahwash went to the Belmont Stakes and discovered that there’s a lot more to horse racing than a bunch of thoroughbreds running in a circle.
Walking through the rain at Belmont Park the first thing that caught my eye was the crowd’s fashion. One half could easily have been pulled from your average college bar on a Friday night, while the other half looked like extras from the set of Titanic. I made my way through the sea of Jacks and Roses to what became a familiar sight: crowded bleachers and overpriced concessions. I looked out at the track and saw horses galloping toward the finish line, one of the appetizer races. I checked my watch only to find that the main event was nearly six hours away. Six hours! That’s a long time to tailgate. Nonetheless, I dutifully made my way to the parking lot where I met up with the rest of my party. This would be my first race day: the 2011 Belmont Stakes.
A hundred years ago, sports culture in the United States was in its infancy. Basketball and football were almost exclusively college pastimes, the first TV broadcast of a sporting event was nearly thirty years away, automobiles puttered along at speeds rivaling present-day rush-hour traffic, and horseracing was by all accounts the most attended sport. It goes without saying that spectator culture has evolved quite a bit from then; nowadays horse racing grabs the average sports fan’s attention no more than three times a year. Yet, on one of those days, here I was at the races.
While the race itself loomed in the evening, tailgating, people-watching, and placing bets took up most of the day. Five minutes before the start of the race the horses were led trotting toward the starting line by their jockeys. That was when everyone from club-level patricians to the white T-shirt gang rose to their feet, hollering as they would for the kickoff of the Super Bowl. A gunshot later, the horses took off and disappeared around the closest bend, briefly re-appearing on the far track before slipping back behind a grove of trees. The crowd was on their tiptoes for the final turn as the animals sprinted to the finish line in a blur of brown and grey. The air above the park then filled with as many mumbles and expletives as there had been raindrops earlier in the day. Gamblers tore up their losing tickets. The race was over.
♦◊♦
Wait, that was it? Six hours of build-up for … 16 seconds of horses passing through my line of vision? That’s barely enough time for me to come up with a good referee taunt. And where were the face-painted hooligans and last-second gasps?
It occurred to me later that day that perhaps my expectations weren’t in line with reality. Race day was about the whole experience, of which the actual race was just one part. Dressing like Colonel Sanders, gambling on a sport you know virtually nothing about, and yes, day drinking are equal components of the Triple Crown race experience. The audience at Belmont that day went to celebrate the past as much as to attend a modern-day sporting event. Perhaps it says a lot about what we’ve come to expect from sports that most people don’t even attend a marquee horse race like Belmont for the race itself. Just think of the different images that come to mind between hearing “a day at theballgame” and “a day at the races.”
Any guy who calls himself a sports fan should see a horse race if he gets the chance—just knowthat it’s not your usual game day. Don’t sit down for Franklin & Bash thinking it’s going to be The Wire. Don’t expect to do the wave or blast an air horn, and don’t expect your buddy to turn to you after a quick change in momentum and say: “Did you see that? I could never, ever do something like that!”
Of course you couldn’t, bro. You’re not a horse.
—Photo Flickr/JGNY