That's what I meant! Street Sense, Hard Spun, Curlin. That makes Street Sense, the chaplain's pick, the first horse to win the Breeder's Cup and also the Kentucky Derby. Calvin Borel, one of the winningest jockeys in Churchill Downs history, takes his first Derby victory. Your correspondent's betting strategy, and perhaps his logic, were slightly skewed, and thus fortune still eludes him. But at least the beer in the press box was free. Next year, baby!

The winner's circle, 2007. Street Sense takes the Derby.

That's today's attendance, the third largest in history. Churchill Downs now pulses with nine-year-old-on-Christmas-Eve-like anticipation. With about a half hour to the big race, the crowds have massed in front of betting windows and beer vendors. Debauchery unfolds unimpeded and many a seer-sucker and classy Derby hat has been irredeemably soiled. Suffering from next to no sleep, a stout hangover, and what I fear may be encroaching gambler's twitch, I look roughly like Ray Liotta at the end of "Goodfellas." But for you, dear reader, I persist. Now it's time to get the cash to make the roughly 400 bets that my friends and family members have requested with no intention of reimbursement. I love you all.

7-12-16. That's the winning trifecta, baby! Street Sense-Nobiz-Tiago. Mark it down and make your millions, like me.

I like to appreciate the majesty of horses at a comfortable remove. I fear and dislike them. This has something to do, I suspect, with a horseback-riding incident at Lake George as a child. But it also involves the sheer size and power of the beasts, their gigantic, dull, terrifying teeth, their utter indifference about relieving themselves, monstrously, wherever they please. I avoid animals generally. But the horse for me evokes outsized terror (along with the ostrich—don’t get me started on that aggressive, beady-eyed, too-big-and-nightmarish-to-even-fly biological abomination), as I suspect it does for many people. But today, because I have a press pass and I can, I swallow the fear and inspect them closely.

Continue reading "Terrifying beasts" »

The infield—equal parts Nascar tailgate, frat party, and prison break—recalls Hunter Thompson's advice to his partner in "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved": "Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin...If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace." I don't recommend traversing this riot scene in your lone suit, as your correspondent may have done.

A Kentucky Colonel opines at the Honorable Order's annual Derby day "Extravaganza."

Early Times is the official julep at the Derby these days. It’s served (and served and served) in delightful commemorative glasses (not “commemorative” as in giant plastic buckets with twisty straws and a 75 percent markup, but real glass!). Churchill Downs expects to sell 140,000 of the potent concoctions this weekend. To do so will require 60,000 pounds of ice, 1,000 pounds of mint leaves and 10,000 bottles of Early Times. Preparations for fueling this bourbon-drenched debacle begin in the summer, Alan George, the brand director of Early Times, told me.

Continue reading "The bourbon connection" »

The Mint Julep, you may have heard, is the customary libation here. It’s made of bourbon, sugar, mint, and water. And it’s absolutely awful. Being a partisan of booze broadly, and of booze with a historical connection to special events that you’re supposed to drink before noon more particularly, I’m surprised by this. Perhaps being a Yankee, and a gin man generally, I simply lack the cultural or genetic constitution required to find some worthy quality in bourbon. I don’t know.

Continue reading "Whiskey on a Saturday" »

A dozen of the 20 horses entered in the Derby—including Curlin, the favorite—have never competed on a wet track. But Hard Spun, Scat Daddy, Storm in May, Street Sense, Teuflesberg and Bwana Bull have all turned in good performances on mud in the past.

Andrew Beyer, probably the country's best racing writer, warns against the inexperienced but impressive Curlin (undefeated in his three races and so far the 5-1 favorite). "No horse with four or fewer career starts has won the Kentucky Derby since Exterminator in 1918," he writes. "He has everything against him. His status as the Derby favorite defies all logic. He'll be lucky to finish in the top 10."

Continue reading "Early favorites" »

No luck on the Oaks, the day's biggest race, despite a last minute text from my brother (who's possessed of intermittent clairvoyance when it comes to the races) plugging the two horse, Cash Included. Victory instead went to Rags to Riches, the favorite. That's 0-6 on the day. As my cab driver told me on the way home (following a 40-minute wait in torrential rain), "I stay away from the horses. Cause I don't bet on nothing that has a brain. Anything with a brain's gonna do whatever it wants whenever it wants to do it."

In his new book, Not by a Long Shot, T. D. Thornton tells the story of a season among the track workers at Suffolk Downs, outside Boston. “The stable area at Suffolk Downs is both physically and sociologically separated from the outside world: a dirt-and-asphalt enclave of barns, dormitories, tack rooms and storage sheds fenced off and heavily guarded from the surrounding sprawl of urbanity,” he writes. This is true at most racetracks. At Churchill Downs some 700 people live night and day on the track’s back side, tending to the 1,600 or so horses that make it the country’s premier racetrack.

Continue reading "The backstretch" »

A befuddled Kentuckian surveys the odds.

So, friends, I confess that wagering at Oaks day has been a complete disaster so far, despite all the tips I've gotten in the last two days (and, seriously, everybody in Louisville from the hotel receptionist to the cop at the press center to a 140-year-old lady whose wheelchair was parked outside the liquor store across from my hotel has delivered what they think is sweet inside dope). Of the five races I've played, in only one has a horse not completely abused my faith in him. It could be because the track is a muddy, sloppy cesspool today. But when considered in combination with my train-wreck of a performance at the Caesar's blackjack tables last night, things look grim. But such advanced failure, I think, is a excellent sign for tomorrow.

Continue reading "Vicissitudes of fortune" »

The muddy, muddy track.

Fears of doping and other unlawful expedients haunt the horse racing world. The sport's regulators enforces the strictest drug testing regimen of any professional sport: the winning horses of every race must submit to tests afterward and all horses regularly need to come clean before state officials. Even so, the racing world is by nature conspiratorial, and suspicions of illegal enhancement never abate.

Continue reading "Bad medicines" »

William Faulkner wrote an essay about Derby weekend for Sports Illustrated in 1955. He called it “Kentucky: May: Saturday,” and it started like this:

“This saw Boone: the bluegrass, the virgin land rolling westward wave by dense wave from the Allegheny gaps, unmarked then, teeming with deer and buffalo about the salt licks and the limestone springs whose water in time would make the fine bourbon whiskey; and the wild men too—the red men and the white ones too who had to be a little wild also to endure and survive and so mark the wilderness with the proofs of their tough survival—Boonesborough, Owenstown, Harrod’s and Harbuck’s stations; Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground.”

Continue reading "Kentucky: May: Friday" »

Post positions are set for Saturday, but the consensus around Louisville, where the average nine year old seems to be an expert handicapper, holds that the field is still wide open. Cab Driver Mike, who drove us into downtown Louisville this evening, said that he liked Street Sense, Scat Daddy, and Hard Spun, in that order, while our first bartender of the night liked Street Sense along with Curlin, the current favorite.

Continue reading "Derby posts are set" »

There are a lucky few in the gambling world possessed of a savant's skill in interpreting a ledger of odds or a Daily Racing Form. I'm not one of them, so my bets usually derive from a mixture of guesswork and the heavily solicited advice of others. The latter strategy led me on Wednesday to an Off Track Betting parlor in midtown Manhattan.

Continue reading "Strategy Schmategy" »

This’ll be a chronicle of my quest for piles and piles of riches at the Kentucky Derby, which starts Saturday. The Atlantic has covered horse racing, on and off, for some time. This blog will be a small contribution to the tradition, and I hope a worthy one.

The sport of kings in 2007 looks a lot like America in 2007. A small cadre of wealthy horse owners compound their wealth largely on the back of speculative investments made by the poor and middle class—all with the public blessing, and putative regulation, of the state. This equation isn't a new one; it's one of the many paradoxes that have helped make the sport such an accessible target for allegory. Famously, in 1938, Damon Runyon titled a short story about the handicapping trade “All Horse Players Die Broke."

I hope to be neither dead nor broke by the end of this weekend, although the potential pitfalls of racing fandom are legion. Much of the coverage of the Kentucky Derby focuses on flowers and hats and the like. But you'll find the more interesting, and edifying, aspects of the trade outside the winner's circle—in the backstretch barns and betting parlors that grease the sport's wheels. I'll aim to show both sides over the next two days. While winning gigantic, gigantic amounts of money.