Who cares about the humans? · 26.06.09

Now I don’t mean to get off on a rant here, but it seems to me that not only is the mainstream media virtually ignoring the sport of horse racing — compared to, say, “real” sports like poker and ultimate fighting — but it is also doing the sport no favours when horse racing does get coverage.

The recent announcement of the upcoming bio-pic of Secretariat has had me thinking about the portrayal of Thoroughbreds in mainstream media and entertainment. My concern with Disney’s movie and how its tentative plot-line were presented is that will hardly be about Secretariat at all, but rather the people around him. As I wrote earlier:

It will be the story of a typical American housewife who “finds herself”, leaving her old life behind as her new career supplants her family and marriage. Secretariat and Meadow Farm will be merely the catalysts for the story, rather than the story itself. If the catalyst was [Penny] Chenery opening a restaurant, or running for political office, the story could remain otherwise almost unchanged.

In contrast, for all its factual shortcomings, at least the movie Seabiscuit had the horse, and the sport of horse racing as a whole, at the centre of the story. The human characters were so unique that they could have only come together in the context of racing — and only a horse like Seabiscuit could have been the centre of their story.

The short shrift that horses and racing get in the movies is even more pronounced in TV broadcasts. Over the course of this year’s Triple Crown series, it seemed like the horses were largely an afterthought. There was little analysis of their past performances, nothing about the “key” races that earned those horses their chance to run in the Derby, Preakness, or Belmont. By contrast, it was the owners and trainers who received most of the coverage. The one exception that comes to mind was Mine That Bird and his trip to Churchill Downs in an ordinary horse trailer. However, even he was overshadowed by trainer Chip Woolley and his broken leg. Derby commentators latched onto those two stories so tightly that Woolley almost decked NBC’s Kenny Rice when he brought it up again immediately after Mine That Bird’s win — and I wouldn’t have blamed him.

This is what passes for reportage and analysis in mainstream coverage of horse racing: little or no legitimate pre-race analysis, but purely “human interest” stories, almost always about the horses’ human connections. So we get Kenny Rice and others yammering about horse trailers and broken legs. We get Kenny Mayne wasting screen-time prioer to the Belmont Stakes chatting with Woolley in his pick-up truck. We get Bob Costas — about whom I will defer to the mighty Dooce.

I’ll be blunt: I don’t care about the human interest angle. Sure, mention Woolley’s broken leg, or Rick Dutrow’s family and substance-abuse issues, ONCE — then move on. Regarding owners, trainers, and jockeys, the only thing I really care about is how well they bring their horses into the race, and what they’ve done to give their horses the best possible chance to win. Everything else is irrelevant. It is called horse racing, people — not jockey racing or trainer racing.

The so-called handicappers that the networks retain are almost as useless. On NBC, Mike Battaglia’s commentary is so pointless that he might as well be giving weather reports. And I swear, ABC’s Hank Goldberg couldn’t build a coherent sentence if it was made out of Lego. Just once I’d like to see a handicapper on TV who is both perceptive and articulate, and who can offer something like:

There’s a lot of early speed in this race, and A, B, and C may very well burn each other out early trying for the lead. If X and Y can stay close enough while stalking the pace one of them will take over on the far turn, but they risk either getting burned by the early pace or being too far back when the leaders tire. This sets things up perfectly for a stone closer like Z to come on in the late stages, and so I’m making him my pick.

… you know, something that might be Handicapping 101 to horseplayers but might be gold to a little old lady who would otherwise put her money on the horse whose jockey reminds her of her grandson Billy. Is that really too much to ask?

The lone exception to such poor mainstream coverage is Jerry Bailey. During last year’s Breeders’ Cup broadcast he analyzed the running styles of each horse in (I think) each race, and described where he thought they would be over the course of the race. During ABC’s Belmont broadcast Bailey applied a similar methodology in deconstructing the Preakness. Using overhead video footage, he pointed out where Mike Smith could have guided Mine That Bird to find the holes that Calvin Borel had found in the Derby, saving considerable ground as a result. His conclusion: if Borel had ridden Mine That Bird in the Preakness rather than Rachel Alexandra, Mine That Bird would have won by about 1/2 length, and they would be talking about a legitimate Triple Crown bid rather than a “Calvin Crown”. Agree or disagree with Bailey’s conclusions, but I don’t think anybody could disagree that we need more of that kind of analysis during horse racing broadcasts. Please sir, may I have some more?

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

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What do you think?

  1. Agreed. The Disney plot line sounds pretty bogus.

    Ms. Chenery may have been a “housewife”, but she also knew her way around horses and she got lucky with Secretariat.

    Long story short, the young horse proved so exceptional during his two year old campaign, that Penny Chenery was able to syndicate the champion for a record 6 million dollars, save her late father’s stud operation, and become a national celebrity as Secretariat astounded the racing world with his Triple Crown series in 1973.

    If it wasn’t for the HORSE, and no disrespect to her, but you’d have never heard of Penny Chenery today.

    I was shocked that this was the direction they were going in.

    — tvnewsbadge · Jun 27, 08:49 AM · #

  2. I hate to say it but the aging population supporting it, the in-fighting of the people in the sport, the drug problems, the loss of newspaper and TV coverage etc etc. continues unabated. Glad I was part of it when I was as the future (at least in North America) is bleak.

    — Dr. T. Yatcak · Jun 27, 09:02 AM · #

  3. I agree totally and in the Breeeders Cup lets have alittle more about the breeding of the horses.

    — Michael Fisher · Jun 28, 05:21 AM · #

  4. I agree totally

    — Ron Turcotte · Jun 28, 10:00 AM · #

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