#jester racetrack I suppose

[chaosfairy18]

jingle jingle

jester man

he has

a jester plan

but alas the jester man

we can hear the bells as you crime

now you must away this time, scram

jingle jingle

jester man

I know who you are, your days are numbered /j but yes Racetrack would jingle the entire time while doing crimes because he cannot take the bells of for comedic purposes

[deehollowaywrites]

A recent race at Santa Anita addressed the age-old question of whether a horse can win a race without a rider.

The answer is no: even if the horse crosses the wire first, its absence of a human component disqualifies it from competition. This seems like an obvious statement, but the relationship of Thoroughbred enthusiasts to jockeys meant that I, your Area Innocent, simply wasn’t sure. And to be fair, what does the average American on the street know about race-riding?

(A small sampling of my day job colleagues indicates that twelve out of thirteen public library professionals do not know who Joel Rosario is. Is she a singer? colleague J asked. He’s a diminutive rock star, I replied. Think Prince, but with a vague eau de cheval.)

A few weeks ago I chatted with a West Coast handicapper on Twitter (hi Ruben!) about the ways in which horse racing is fragmented, how its projected and maintained image conflicts with its realities. Outside the scope of that conversation, which revolved around how racing uses feminine imagery in marketing versus how it deals with actual female participants and fans, I was reminded of this good write-up from Natalie Voss at Paulick Report. Highly accessible human athletes, bullet #5 recaps in blithe tones. My reaction upon the initial read and my reread just now boils down to ‘oh word?’ because this does not strike me as an accurate assessment.

Racing's human athletes should be accessible; they should be given more time, support, and attention than they are, especially considering they’ve got the most dangerous job in sports (a common average is about two jockey deaths per year directly resulting from the racetrack). A horse doesn’t run by itself.

This year’s ESPY for Thoroughbred Jockey went to John Velazquez, not that that fact was included on the 2017 ESPYs Wikipedia page. Mazel tov, John! Well deserved. 2017 has been a good year for you, considering you and Always Dreaming won the Kentucky Derby this past May. Johnny V. also won the ESPY in 2011, which happens to be the year of his previous Kentucky Derby win aboard Animal Kingdom. Sensing a theme? Racing’s human athletes intersect with the larger world of US sports in only the most tangential and cursory ways. I’m no expert, and there must be a variety of factors--the scattered and year-round race schedule paired with the amount of necessary travel jockeys carry out; the perception of racing as insular, niche, and for either the idle rich or inveterate gamblers; the still-racialized remnant of racing’s earliest days, when jockeys were often enslaved men; the natural isolation of players within a pro sport that isn’t team-based--but the most visible and still the strangest issue for me is how people within the world of racing interact with jockeys.

Maybe it’s normal. But it looks odd to a newcomer.

A book I was dipping into recently paraphrased a trainer referring to riders as “the weakest link” and noted a general distrust of jockeys, both from trainers and from the betting public. The Racing Onion jokes that trainers worry about their daughters growing up to date jocks (no word on how trainers feel about their daughters growing up to be jocks). It’s not unusual for an industry Twitter like NYRA’s to name Jose Ortiz in a tweet about a winning horse, but ignore, say, Eric Cancel. The average number of comments on a post at Paulick or Blood-Horse celebrating a jockey’s achievements is around three. Even in the case of a recent one about Frankie Dettori, the majority of comments are speculations about drug use. The lone comment on a write-up of Nik Juarez’s very good Maryland Million Day credits his recent successes to his agent--which, I’m sure Ron Anderson is a mensch but he’s not the guy on the horse. In a predictable move, a Yankee-enthusiast horseplayer on Twitter decided that Victor Carrasco rooting for the Astros meant he deserves to start losing when he comes back to the track after an injury. 

(I have to wonder how horseplayers might react if US riders, African-American or otherwise, participated in #TakeAKnee--given that J.T. Brown, an athlete in a similarly conservative sport, received death threats for doing so.)

At any rate, why should I expect the rest of the country to respect riders and take an interest in them when their putative fanbase regards them as afterthoughts at best?

Your horse didn’t win? Rider’s fault. Your horse won? Well, he won all by himself! Our test subject Rosario... The sport-within-a-sport here seems to be knocking his rides. As noted, when racing Twitter’s court jester makes the crack, you know it’s true. How many G1s does a guy need to nail before onlookers allow that perhaps he does know what he’s doing? (For those following along at home, Rosario's won six Grade 1 races in 2017 as of this writing). American jockeys don’t have a players’ union; they’ve got the Jockeys’ Guild, which doesn’t carry the clout of, e.g., the NFLPA. They’ve got a podcast here and a fundraiser there and plenty don’t have access to workers’ compensation since statutes vary according to state gaming and parimutuel boards. Even the top tier aren’t immune to abuse yelled at them as they walk back after a race: they’re chastised for every loss, often not even named in write-ups and tweets of their wins, but the races don’t run without them.

It’s two thousand fucking seventeen and I’m supposed to be impressed that finally there’s concussion protocols for riders? Ok.

I joke about Barbara Livingston shooting another beefcake calendar. I pose the seemingly-obvious question of why Jockey has never had a jockey brand ambassador, because who wouldn’t want to see Javier Castellano doing his best blue steel in well-cut underpinnings? We all observe Victor Espinoza’s Monster antics, but nobody can deny that the guy gets his, and he might as well. I wouldn’t hold my breath over corporate sponsors effectively utilizing these highly accessible athletes any time soon. But I’m still holding out for a more perfect union between horseplayers and horsemen.

Today’s hunch bet: The X, #8 in the 7th at Keeneland. A foreboding boy.