On Horses

There are few things in modern life that still feel genuinely ancient.

You can visit the Pantheon. You can stand inside Hagia Sophia. You can fly to Italy and walk through Pompeii or Herculaneum. Those are great to visit. But they are ruins.

@theculturemuse

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But the quickest portal to the ancient world is simpler than all of that. Go watch the horse races.

@saratogaracetrack.com

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Horse racing feels older than other sports because it is older than other sports. It is the oldest continuously surviving spectator sport in the world. The Olympics vanished for more than a millennium and had to be revived. Football, soccer, and golf are toddlers by comparison. Horse racing never stopped. You can trace a line from the hippodromes and circuses of the ancient world through the Middle Ages to the dirt of a modern track

You smell the animal and the dirt and the alcohol. You hear the same sound of the large beasts striking the ground like a Roman spectator under August did. The experience of watching a horse race is identical across two thousand years. Nothing about it feels like a modern reenactment of an ancient sport. You are watching the thing itself, still alive.

I go to the racetrack about once a year, and every time I do, I am reminded how strangely it sits inside modern life. Horse racing does not quite belong to our age. Neither, in a way, does the mix of the crowd it attracts. On a big race day, it’s wealthy owners, older guys with money, serious bettors, working men, families on a day out, groups of girls dressed up, obsessive gamblers, old regulars who have been coming for decades. It’s one of the few remaining public spaces where different classes and types still share the same ground without fully pushing one another out.

@cbwritescopy

You cannot beat a summer at Saratoga

The race track is so old, it gives us one of the oldest dating tips in history. From 2,000 years ago. The Roman Ovid suggested to take a girl to the races, have her pick her favorite horse, and you place a bet on it. This still works today. Betting on a sports team isn’t romantic. But betting on a horse on a date and watching a race is. Women love horses. Much more than sports teams.

Modern Sports Are Turning into Horse Racing

It’s no accident that horse racing has survived this long. That’s because it is the platonic form of a spectator sport.

You can see this clearly now because other sports are starting to resemble horse racing. There has been a major shift over the last decade.

The old narrative was that the athlete represented merit. Owners stayed in the background. Gambling was shameful. Pedigree was not supposed to matter. Any kid from anywhere could make it.

But horse racing never told that story. Ownership mattered. Breeding mattered. Gambling mattered. Most people went to the race to study the field, place a bet, and watch the outcome. Everyone was openly trying to get paid, the owner, the trainer, the jockey, the bettor in the stands. The sport was never embarrassed by that. It understood that the wager did not corrupt the spectacle. It intensified it.

@bearbetspod

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For generations, American sports culture pretended gambling was some external contamination. Then sports betting became legal and flooded back in. This looks like a dramatic change, but it is just a return to the original condition. Gambling and spectator sport have always belonged together.

And you can feel gambling is everywhere now. Soldiers are betting on wars they are actually in. Even Trump admits the world is a casino now. Men were throwing dice, casting lots, and making private wagers long before the racetrack. But horse racing is the oldest surviving template for mass sports betting. It took gambling out of the private room and attached it to a public spectacle

Genetics and Ownership

Horse racing has always been blunt about genetics. Pedigree sits at the center of the sport. Breeding is on the actual program. Winning horses retire and produce the next generation of winning horses.

Modern sports are beginning to sound more like this. If you look closer modern sports are becoming dynastic. The sons of former players are everywhere.

In a recent study on the nBA, approximately 25% have a father who played high-level professional basketball. If you expand that definition is expanded to include any relative who was an "elite athlete" (Olympian, Pro, or High-Level NCAA), the number jumps to 49%. Even in Professional baseball, approximately 15% of the Top 100 Prospects in the 2025 class were legacy players, a rate that has climbed since 2020.

The fan watching a pro sports game is increasingly watching something closer to a thoroughbred bloodline. And there is no reason why this will not continue to grow over time.

The same shift shows up in ownership. Horse racing has always been an owner’s sport. The owner’s money, prestige, and colors are part of the spectacle. He is not hidden behind the institution. He is out there in front.

Traditionally, in Pro sports, the owner stayed in the background but this is also changing. Owners now give interviews, build personal brands, attract camera time, and turn themselves into part of the drama. Players come and go. Coaches come and go. Sometimes even the city comes and goes. But the owner stays.

It feels this way when a Saudi or Qatari billionaire buys a soccer team. The club is just a larger stable. Wrexham makes the same point from the American angle, Ryan Reynolds turned ownership itself into the product. He made an entire show about being the owner. The smaller club was just the horses.

Horse Racing is Slowly Dying

The irony of all of this is that modern sports are becoming more like horse racing, horse racing itself is slowly dying. Go to the track on a random day. Most of the regulars are old. The people who still love it are aging out, and they are not being replaced at the same rate.

There’s a few reasons. Horse racing once held a central place in gambling culture. It no longer has anything close to a monopoly on legal betting. But now sportsbooks and every other form of digital gambling are faster, easier, and better suited to modern attention spans.

Also, part of the problem is plain moral revulsion. Modern audiences do not stomach the sport the way earlier audiences did. When a horse breaks down on the track and is killed in public, the whole thing looks a bit barbaric for modern audiences. The organization Horseracing Wrongs has reported that 11,000 horses have been put to death at American racetracks since 2014.

But the real big problem is tempo. Horse racing was built for a slower world. There are long gaps between races, often 25 or 30 minutes. It’s a sport that expects patience. Modern audiences want constant stimulation. Even baseball had to add a pitch clock to survive. Now it’s thriving again.

I genuinely think the big racetracks, the Churchills and Ascots, will survive, these are spectacles, but the rest of the smaller race tracks are in trouble. We are saying a slow goodbye to horse racing, just as we once said goodbye to the horse as a tool of labor.

In This Newsletter

1) Who Really Loves the Horse? Men loved the horse as long as it gave them speed and power. Once machines did those things better, men moved on. Women did not. Women may be the horse’s true modern loyalists.

2) The Hidden Side Effect of the Napoleonic Wars. We learn about Napoleon as a story of battles. But his wars created a horse shortage that helped accelerate the transition to railroads and eventually the machine age.

3) The Horse and the Water Buffalo. The horse made Europe faster and stronger, but it also competed with humans for food.

Who Really Loves Horses?

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