American Horse Racing’s Biggest Gamble

There will be a lot of gambling done on Belmont Stakes Day: millions of dollars will be won and lost at tracks all across the country. But the biggest gamble will be taken by the sport itself. Barely a month after the death of Eight Belles, racing will go all-in, betting on the injured hoof of Big Brown and hoping for the big score every bettor wishes for.

The satisfaction of that score has already diminished; Big Brown’s story is not as heartwarming as local legend Smarty Jones’s, nor is his trainer a big ol’ teddy bear you can root for. There are no Frances Genters to accept the trophy if he wins; Big Brown is owned by what is basically a hedge fund of investors. And then there is the issue of his sore feet; the quarter-crack he currently has may not be a big deal to his connections, nor to his doctors, but it is a news story that scares the bejeezus out of most of the folks that will tune in to ABC on Saturday.

What if he breaks down?
ESPN’s Dan Patrick said in the SportsCentury program on Secretariat that horse racing has become a sport “in absentia.” This is not only true of the bettors who shun the tracks to bet at home, or online, or not at all, but to the millions who tune in to see if a horse can sweep the Triple Crown. These folks tune in watch a race, and afterwards horse racing will be absent from their thoughts until the next time the Kentucky Derby is run or the Triple Crown is on the line. That is, unless there is an incident like Eight Belles’ breakdown. With each tragedy, horse racing falls into a hotter spotlight, one that it is not comfortable with.

Most of the people that watch know horse racing is not all sunshine and lollipops. But they don’t care, really. It’s just a TV show to most. They really don’t want to know how the jockeys starve themselves, or how American horses are drugged like the East German women’s swim team. But if Big Brown goes down Saturday, they might start asking why this is happening. And even worse for the sport, Congress will. Everyone saw how baseball wilted under Congress’s glare. Racing has infinitely more sleazy characters than baseball’s steroid users, no central authority to unify a defense, and worst of all, no excuse for why their horses are drugged up and dying.

Horse racing is run around the world, with little of the rampant drug use present in America. In fact, Big Brown’s toughest rival in the Belmont, the Japanese colt Casino Drive, runs on little more than “hay, water, and oats”. It’s kind of like watching a naturally trained Rocky Balboa taking on a drugged-up Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, only in reverse. But it begs the question: if they can run naturally, why can’t we? American racing will have a very hard time proving to the masses that they aren’t affecting the breakdown numbers with irresponsible drug use if something happens to Big Brown: a huge animal on the steroid Winstrol, among other drugs, with a history of foot problems.

They will also have a hard time staying on national television. PETA may not know anything about the sport, but they smelled weakness when Eight Belles died and tried to capitalize. Their calls for the demise on the sport will be louder if racing’s biggest star goes down over a month after its most surprising star gave her life. And what TV exec in his or her right mind would want to keep televising these debacles in this era of political niceness? Programs get cancelled all the time for objectionable content–horses flailing around on a track with three legs working is about as objectionable as it gets for a lot of people who love the sport, or love animals, or just don’t want to have to explain to their kids what happened to Eight Belles.

Belmont Stakes Day could be a banner day for racing. The sport’s powers that be are betting that Big Brown will run away with the race, with 130,000 in beautiful Belmont Park cheering him on, while millions do the same in front of their TVs. But losing this bet means, at best, another failure to capture their version of the Holy Grail. At worst, it will be a mass witness to the funeral of another of their brightest stars, and a funeral to the sport as a viable form of entertainment in this country.

It’s a hell of a bet to make.

By Bill B. for Sportscolumn