Starting a blog

A few months ago I decided to start a blog when I was working on an essay for graduate school. The constraints of academic writing were suffocating me and I wanted to find to enjoy writing again. I realized that if I started a blog I could write for fun and I would also have an excuse to dig up some of my old work and edit it.

I plan to write about horse racing and share some of my thoughts about the past, present, and future of the sport and reflect upon my own time in the industry. The content is going to be introspective and many of the posts will relate to Northern California racing, although some of my posts will be larger in scope. I realize I will be writing about niche topics within a niche topic and therefore my potential audience is small, but that’s OK. This is just a small vanity project that I am taking up in my spare time.

Thank you to everybody who read my first post, especially those who provided positive feedback and encouragement!

Where nobody knows your name: appreciating solitary racetrack experiences

With the exception of the tracks that host boutique meets, racetracks and off-track betting facilities tend to be places where socializing can easily be kept to a minimum. It does not seem hyperbolic to imagine a scene where a horseplayer drops dead and everybody else responds by stepping over the dead body in order to put down a wager on the upcoming race from Hawthorne.
 
But it is this cold aloofness that, in a weird way, makes racetracks incredibly inclusive places. They are places where you can go where nobody cares about your family background, education level, income, or ‒ in my case when I was 8 years old ‒ if you are covered in scabs due to a recent case of chickenpox. Everybody is too preoccupied with their gambling to find any perceived deficiencies in others, giving visitors the chance to have a communal experience while requiring minimal human interaction. There may already be a stigma about going to the track, but there is no extra stigma for going alone. 
 
When I was young, I frequently tagged along with my father when he went to Bay Meadows, but by the time I was in grade school my interest in the sport waned and my trips became increasingly sporadic. Due to a confluence of factors, I redeveloped an interest in horse racing when I was in high school and I found myself reading racing websites, avoiding homework by lingering on racing message boards, and recording the local replay television show in addition to joining my father on his trips to the track. My father was no longer asking me if I wanted to go to the track. Instead, I was asking him if we could go (“We have to go to the track this weekend! It’s the San Francisco Mile, the only grade 2 race in Northern California!”).
 
I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, but years later I realized that the racetrack was a safe haven for me, a place I could wander and explore on my own and not have to think about my high school anxieties. Although my high school experience was unremarkable and I had a group of friends, I certainly was not cool. At the track, I did not have to worry about grades or social status and could instead focus on trying to figure out who was going to win the upcoming race for $6,250 claimers.
 
I became so captivated by racing that I decided to pursue a career in the industry. I had become drawn to the sport because it was a haven for outsiders, but once I started working in the industry my livelihood depended on me becoming an insider. It was an unfamiliar position for me, and I never felt 100% comfortable with it.
 
I started thinking about the topic of solitary racetrack experiences last summer when NYRA announced it was developing the sections at the end of its lengthy grandstand into The Stretch, a “exclusive, private hospitality area” featuring “modern and upscale amenities.” The blogger Jessica Chapel lamented the change because the end sections were one of her favorite places to watch races by herself, and I saw a separate conversation on Facebook about how private locations at racetracks seem to be disappearing. I recently reached out to Jessica Chapel and a few other people I know to get their thoughts about their own solitary racetrack experiences.
 
Jessica Chapel (https://jessicachapel.com):

It's something about the track that has spoken to me from the first — horseplayers are a community and yet it's one in which everyone is very happy to leave each other alone. It was also something I appreciated about NYC OTB. I have found among other horseplayers solace and solitude at times when I needed both and that a space exists for that to happen sometimes seems miraculous, it's so out of step with how many spaces are built now.

A member of horse racing media who asked to remain anonymous: 

I definitely spent more enjoyable time wandering around [my local track] by myself with a camera in my hand than I did attending huge racing days during my early days at the track. It had a lot of appeal for me as an introvert. You have the freedom to do anything you want within the structure of the race card.

Jessica Paquette, senior vice president of marketing at Suffolk Downs:

I’ve always thought of the racetrack as the island of misfit toys - I had never felt like I really fit in anywhere until I found the racetrack and there’s still nowhere else I’m more comfortable. Being so public facing in racing has definitely changed that experience for me - doing the broadcast at Suffolk for more than a decade has made me more recognizable than I’d often prefer to local fans. I can’t just go hang out at Suffolk to watch simulcasting - I sort of always have to be “on”. Luckily, at any other racetrack I can be totally anonymous but I do often feel a little self imposed pressure to be social professionally.

Joe Nevills, bloodstock editor for the Paulick Report and blogger: 

It wasn’t hard to find a place to watch the races by yourself at Mount Pleasant Meadows, a track where the average daily attendance might reach three digits if you count the jockeys in the irons.

This was fine by me. The roar of a thousands-strong crowd is intoxicating, but only for those desperate moments between the final turn and the finish. You only pick up the macro-details. Nothing matters to a crowd except the outcome of the race. In my time alone at the racetrack, I found the true beauty of the sport in its everyday details.

My favorite place to do this was at the top of the stretch, where it was me, the medics in a rumbling ambulance who mostly just got to watch a day at the races, and the hornets in the fenceposts that I needed to avoid.

Mount Pleasant was a four-furlong oval with a long Quarter Horse chute emptying into the stretch. Nearly every race started in that chute, since there was no rush to move the gate out of the way when the horses came back around. This meant every horse and rider had to pass in front of me to go to the gates, the starting gate was often set up right in front of me, and I was still close enough to the finish that I could probably figure out who won from my vantage point.

This meant I could hear nearly everything that was going on during the most important parts of a race. I could hear the jockeys talking to the outriders and amongst themselves as they headed behind the gate and hear the air rush through the noses of their mounts on the way by. I could hear the starter call for each number to be loaded, and then the gate crew communicate with the starter with colorful language when a horse was acting up.

When the gates opened, I could hear the jockeys chirp, smooch, and whip as they urged their horses ahead. What was more interesting, though, was once the horses were on their way, and the gate was quiet again. You could hear the gate crew – many of them the trainers of the horses in the race – commenting on the race as it happened. The racehorses plodded by in an instant, I’d shoot a photo of them making the turn for my records, and then the trainers/gate crew/pony riders followed behind to unsaddle their charges and start the process over again.

The kind of insight you picked up from that spot on the rail, on both the races in progress and life at large, could only come at a place where the horsemen were forced to do it all themselves, and spent a ton of time together. The conversations were usually mundane – I never got a single last-minute tip from my eavesdropping that led me to rush to the nearest betting window – but this was still a glance into normal life for a racetracker that most on the spectator side of the fence are never privy to.

The wave of sound that follows a great horse in a great race ignites a powerful infatuation with the sport of horse racing, but crowds are fickle. They disperse once they get what they want, and they have a short memory once they’re gone. Love is individual, found by the ones who stick around and take the time to listen and learn, even in the most mundane of times. The top of the stretch at Mount Pleasant Meadows is one of the places where I learned to love horse racing.