On Derby Day, Think About Horses, Not Just Hats

To me, horses have been narrative tools, scarcely different from a sunset over the Rose Bowl or the Olympic flame. So here I am with my friend and colleague, Natalie Voss, the terrific equine journalist who also owns and rides Blueberry in competition, and has brought me to his side so that I might better know him and his species. A start.

Saturday's 152nd Kentucky Derby, like all Kentucky Derbies, is the horsiest day in America by a wide margin (excepting, occasionally, a Belmont Stakes with a Triple Crown at stake, but even then, the Derby is the Derby, appointment viewing). But it is not about horses. It is about spectacle. It is about mint juleps and hats and the thousands of Derby parties connected to Louisville by NBC's broadcast. It is about celebrities who have flown into Kentucky to walk a red carpet and sit in a private suite, to be seen, but only briefly. It is about wagering; boy is it about wagering. It is about the infield and the paddock and the long homestretch. It is about the connective tissue of sports history and Americana, where we can drop the names of Citation and Secretariat and the mind-boggling reminder that the first Derby was contested 10 years after the end of the Civil War. All of these things are delightful. (Okay, not the Civil War, but the rest of it). It is a uniquely joyful day on the sports and social calendar of the nation.

But again, not really about horses. The horses are part of the Derby not as living creatures, but as set pieces in this grand sports celebration. The horses are presented and praised two-dimensionally: For their victories, for their parentage, the prices paid for them, their competitive styles -- leader, stalker, closer. For the color of their coat and the markings on their faces.

But most of all, for the human beings who breed them, own them, train them, ride them. These can be affecting and revealing narratives. Over the years I have written about the hometown buddies who cobbled together $75,000 to buy 2003 Derby winner Funny Cide, about the Cowboys who came to Louisville with longshot gelding Mine That Bird in 2009 and won the roses, about Bill Mott, the modest racetrack lifer who won last year with Sovereignty. About jockeys like the fearless Calvin Borel or the ageless Mike Smith. About owners like Roy and Pat Chapman (Smarty Jones, 2004), who met late in life at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and helped save each other. Dozens more, and thousands from others like me, because the sport is unusually stocked with humans who have lived full lives, suffered, and survived. All of them, notably, one degree of separation from the horse himself or herself.

This year you will learn the stories of Mark Glatt, who trains Santa Anita Derby winner So Happy, and whose wife and teammate, Dena, died in February. And again of Mott, who returns to the Derby to race against his son, Riley, who I first met when he was mucking stalls for his dad and wearing a t-shirt from the northwestern Connecticut prep school he attended and which is near my home and could have two Derby starters. They are good tales, doing the storytelling work that horses cannot do for themselves.

But what of those horses? Their lived experience is broadly lost. They become almost avatars, not fully alive. Vessels for a saddle cloth. Trainers will talk about horses that have "good minds," but they struggle, even when asked, to describe precisely what that means, in part because they know the animals so much better than we do and that experience gap is difficult to bridge in consumable sound bites. Jockeys describe the ways in which horses try hard (or do not), like a racing surface (or do not), give of themselves to the line (or do not). Mostly, we have to take their word for it. Once I wrote a story in which I interviewed some human track athletes to ask what it felt like to race two minutes, the approximate length of the Kentucky Derby; for that same piece trainer John Shirreffs, who died this past winter (and will be enshrined in the Racing Hall of Fame this summer), said to me that 24 seconds – per quarter mile in a distance race – is “anaerobic.” That had real meaning: To humans, anaerobic means it hurts. But is a horse’s pain a human’s pain? Horses’ physiology is different from humans’. We just can’t know. But is it not important to ask?

Sometimes the horse will show us, and a window briefly opens. When Secretariat moved, in Chic Anderson's words, "like a tremendous machine." When Afleet Alex was knocked almost to her knees in the 2005 Preakness, then rose and ran to a resounding victory. When Zenyatta staggered down the first homestretch of the 2010 Breeders Cup Classic, her hooves stuck in unfamiliar dirt, falling 20 lengths off the pace and then willing herself to run in real time, nearly winning. When Journalism barged through two horses and ran to win last year's Preakness. More painfully, when Barbaro stood in front of the Pimlico clubhouse, badly injured and confused. When Eight Belles fell forward on two broken legs at the finish of the 2008 Derby.

But even then we're forced into an emotional response, not asked for an intellectual understanding. Compelled toward the latter, we usually pass. Food chain and all. Instead, the horses are subliminally passed off as equipment, like shoulder pads or lob wedges. (Important distinction here: People inside racing hold horses with deep emotion. They are separate from the public, literally and metaphorically).

Blueberry stood still in the breeze while I patted his neck, his back, his shoulder. Maybe he liked it; maybe he tolerated me. Racing is both graceful and violent -- the cinematic artistry of movement and the battering of hooves on the earth, thousands of pounds of force with each footfall. Since movement is to many humans the horse's natural state, stillness is affecting. At rest, Blueberry exudes tranquility. Personal level here: On the spectrum of human states, I do intense far better than peaceful, which is obviously sub-optimal, but you know, deadlines. Blueberry chilled me out, a surprise. Not sure how he did that, but if you’ve had a cool pet in your life, the connection is accessible. It is easy, even in this tiny sample, to surmise why horses make such effective therapy animals. Their calm is infectious. It’s more difficult to imagine them as a vessel.

Pause. Left turn. There is also a growing distance between human athletes and spectators, members of the same species (you knew that). Evolving technology makes the games on our screens seem more alive, but makes the athletes seem superhuman, not more human. Indestructible. The average NFL fan would be informed by watching a single series from the sideline, where the power of the collisions is visceral, much more than when filtered through the internet and reproduced in pixels. Up close, it is astounding that players rise from the turf and play again. Perhaps it would dull the impulse to criticize failure, simply because the one who failed is highly compensated.

The explosion of legal sports betting is another layer. Prop bets are an engine of economic growth, but also a vehicle for turning the player in some small way into the bowl on the roulette wheel or the numbers on a lottery ticket. Ever more distance is created.

Full stop here: Racehorses are animals, not humans. But we are in adjacent realms here. Of all the elements of a horse race -- none are more important than the flesh and blood performance of the horse. However poorly it is understood, however maximally it is influenced by humans, it deserves engagement at the least. (This is also not a column about horse welfare, a powerful buzz-phrase from the last decade, and a movement that has produced meaningful improvement, but some humans' insistence on casting horses' lives as less worthy of protecting than their own was a discomforting force in parrying that effort.) So it's simple on a basic level: Think of the horses, too. That’s all. Without them, there is no Derby, no Triple Crown, no sport. Be as fascinated as I am as to what they endure, what they feel, what they seek. Food chain be damned.

As I left Blueberry's paddock, Voss handed me the lead rope as she opened the swinging gate. I held it loosely, and drifted off, distracted, on to something else. Blueberry tossed his head and landed a shot on the front of my face, throwing me sideways, sending a few cartoon stars skyward. From chilling me out to knocking me out. Communication delivered in two ways – one as subtle as silence, the other as explicit as thunder. A well deeper than a wager.

Tim Layden is writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.