My Year of the Racehorse (7 page)

Then we're taken inside the barn, where a groom leads Tiznow, a dark brown horse with Man o' War bloodlines and four white socks on his hooves, to the middle of another draughty, spotless room.

“He's used to people taking photos,” Sean says as we slowly reach for our cameras. “He likes flashes.”

After this build-up, we're all excited to see the biggest money-earner at WinStar, Distorted Humor. But for insurance reasons, the horse isn't allowed to be brought out. Instead, we're only allowed to glance at him in his stable several feet away, from an angle. The champion studhorse is like a celebrity who has forbidden his underlings to make eye contact with him.

Distorted Humor nicely highlights the difference between a champion racehorse and one that produces champions. Secretariat, who together with Man o' War regularly enters any bourbon-soaked conversation as the greatest thoroughbred ever, only fathered a couple of decent runners. Like many champions, the 2004 winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, Smarty Jones was retired as a three-year-old—even though thoroughbreds tend to peak physically in their fourth and fifth years—to protect his value as a stud. In his first year at Three Chimneys Farm, about a mile away from WinStar, he sired 110 mares at $100,000 per foal. But according to a May 2009 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, his progeny have collectively “won 18 races, only four have won more than once, and they have collectively won just one stakes race, in Puerto Rico.” The beloved champion, who still receives thirty pieces of fan mail per week, has seen his stud fee reduced to $40,000.

By comparison, Distorted Humor was a relatively undistinguished runner, winning eight races and earning $769,964 before retiring to stud as a six-year-old in 1999, but his babies, which include 2003 Derby winner Funny Cide, collectively won $6,901,568 in 2006 alone. With some of his progeny selling as yearlings for seven-figure sums at the Keeneland auction, the horse is worth between $125 and $150 million and earns $6 million a week. This tycoon wage comes even after his $150,000 stud fee was lowered from $225,000 because of the weak economy.

With the tour completed, we board the bus back to the Kentucky Horse Park. Celeste tries on the kitschy necklace in the shape of a horse that I buy her at the gift shop. “I've always wanted something like this,” she says stiffly. “I'm not joking.”

Our guide asks us if there are any questions. When no else has anything to ask, I raise my hand like a keener in math class. “So, does the sperm of an older horse degrade as he ages?” I ask.

Our guide pauses a moment, the light in his eyes dimming. “Yes, it does,” he says, reluctantly.

Celeste shakes her head. “You know, there are kids on this tour,” she says. “Why do you have to bring up semen?”

“Sperm,” I correct her. “It's the proper term. Besides, we are on a tour of breeding farms. We're drenched in horse sex.”

“Yeah,” Celeste says, “but they're taking pains to speak about it in the most discreet way, and you kind of ruin it by using words like ‘semen.'”

I catch a couple of dirty looks from the parents around me, who instinctively lean over and shield their kids from such crude language.

“Sperm,” I tell Celeste again.

BACK IN VANCOUVER, Randi tells me the ownership papers for Mocha Time are ready. “You're doing this through Nick,” she says, panting into the phone on her mail route. Maybe her breathing's heavy from the cigarettes, or maybe she's just having a cigarette. “I can't fucking deal with it right now.”

I wedge a blank cheque in my wallet like a rubber—hoping, in this case, I won't get screwed. Nick's in the backstretch that Wednesday, entry day at the track, when all of the following weekend's races are set. For entry day, track officials distribute a conditions book, which lists potential races like menu items: conditional races, for instance, can be limited to maidens (horses who've never won—in their career or that season) or run at special distances. From this sampler, trainers will stick their horses where its prospects seem most promising—in the worst possible company.

On entry day, a jockey's agent buzzes around finding his rider mounts, pairing the jockey with the horse that will give him the best shot at a percentage of the purse; the hotter the jockey, the more live ones he'll bag (creating a chicken-egg scenario). A race is called off without at least five entries, so an agent might also hustle around bluffing and puffing up other trainers to join the party.

A track steward is announcing the entries in each race over tinny loudspeakers when I find Nick, who's agenting again for Mexican-born rider Pedro Alvarado, having a smoke outside the tack shop. On race days, he paces purposefully from frontside to backside and back again, his eyes lit like pessimistic fog lights. Planted in a patch of pavement, he hunches with a condition book under his arm, restlessly casting glances about. Two hours after I awaken, his work is already done for the day.

“How did you end up agenting again?” I say. “I thought you didn't like all that lying.”

“I don't like lying,” Nick says, “but it's part of the job. Everyone's got a job to do.”

“Is the money good?”

“Not good enough.”

Nick offers to buy me a coffee in the cafeteria. Waiting in line, he explains in his precise, straightforward manner that an agent takes a quarter of a rider's income. Unlike their counterparts in the film or literary industries, jock's agents are prevented by potential conflicts from representing more than a rider or two per track (the second rider is generally an apprentice). While a jockey can make a good living at Hastings, a quarter of one rider's income, for six months, is part-time wages. Nick waves away the change I hold out for him at the cashier.

We take our Styrofoam cups of coffee to a table, where I whip out my blank cheque.

“This is money you can afford to lose, right?” Nick asks me. “There's no guarantee she will win it back.”

Nick already knows I know this, but says it anyway, like a television cop reading a repeat offender his Miranda rights. His manner betrays a grudging fatalism that comes from hanging around people who make decisions they know are bad—they can be warned, but not stopped.

As with all my purchases over $200, there's an internal alarm that I must disengage like a squalling home-security alarm. It's only money, I tell myself, pen nose-diving onto my cheque. Even if you lose it all, there's enough left for rent and fish sticks.

“This is only for one year, right?” I say. “I said that already, right?”

Nick nods.

“Should I make this out to you or Randi?” I ask.

“Randi's fine.”

Nick allows me to mull over the signed cheque. While Randi's devotion to physical labour is both incomprehensible and icky to me, I can relate to Nick's more pensive, inward nature. Unlike Randi, whose fucks and cocksuckers come off like exhaust fumes streaming from her brain, you get the feeling Nick holds back. I'm not surprised, then, when he says he left the track about a decade ago to go back to school in Kamloops, where he studied writing.

We head towards the steward's office to fill out paperwork for the horse.

“Did you ever write about horseracing?” I ask him.

“Yeah, I did a piece for a class on personal journalism. I got an A,” he says, smiling. “You want to read it?”

“Definitely.”

Unlike with Harris, this time I mean it.

IT'S WHILE LEAVING the backstretch that I see a notice for New Stride, a local, volunteer-run foundation dedicated to finding homes for racehorses leaving the track. The visit to the racehorse nursing home at the Kentucky Horse Park offered me a glimpse of the plush accommodations given to Derby winners in their dotage, but what becomes of the horses at this track—thoroughbreds who are too far away from racing's hubs to reserve a place in such lush quarters? It's an issue I've tried to ignore, fearing the unsettling scenarios. New Stride, at least, presents a hopeful twist to this harsh reality of the sport. So I call the number on the bottom of the poster.

After sending an email that suggests that I'll be pitching a freelance story on their foundation, a New Stride volunteer director sends me to Allbury Farms in Abbotsford, outside the city. This horse farm serves as a foster home for New Stride.

Organizations like New Stride, which was founded in 2002 and receives partial funding from Hastings Park, belong to a loosely aligned collection of groups devoted to salvaging thoroughbreds who'd otherwise be slaughtered when they leave the track. No one I've spoken with seems to know the number of racehorses retired each year, but it's somewhere close to the forty thousand racehorses born annually in North America. With a budget cobbled together from fifty-fifty raffles and Sunday farmers' markets, New Stride can afford to keep eighteen horses at any given time, in three separate foster homes, while retraining them so they can avoid the killing floor.

If Allbury Farms is a racehorse orphanage, it's a benevolent, almost idyllic one on forty acres of soft, undulating pasture, presided over by Wynn Bunbury, the farm's owner. Bunbury, who volunteers for New Stride, has a throaty laugh and a patient, even-keeled demeanour. She has twenty-four horses on her farm, including four of her own, each of which costs about $500 a month to maintain. In the past year, she's kept eleven New Stride horses.

“The ones here are turning over pretty well,” says Bunbury in the feed room of her barn, which is airy and cool and has only a few horses in stalls. “We do not have the same horses that we started out with a year ago.”

The hot-blooded animals here arrive from the track unhappy to be deprived of their routine. Bunbury and I exit the barn and walk along its outside wall to meet Agro, a newbie at Allbury. “He's not an easy keeper,” Bunbury says about Agro, who stares out at a chestnut equine in a fenced-off field opposite his stall. “He's been here a month and he's very bouncy.”

At Hastings, Agro had a more-than-respectable career with twelve wins in sixty-eight starts and $162,413 in winnings. In his last race in August, the eight-year-old brown gelding rallied from three wide and gained the lead to win a race at the $5,000 claiming level. A ligament injury, which ended his career at the track, has kept him in his stall; it's what makes him ornery and restless. Despite his layoff, Agro still looks as though he could run a quarter in twenty-two seconds, and doesn't seem pleased to be in such tranquil surroundings.

The horse that Agro looks to with such longing is his stall mate, Irish Opinion, a Kentucky-bred horse who raced at Woodbine and Golden Gate, winning fifteen races and $279,906. “That boy is able to go out after weeks of being inside,” Bunbury says. “This guy is missing him.”

Having spent most of his life indoors, Agro paces around the pasture skittishly. “He's saying, ‘Somebody come and get me,'” explains Bunbury, who bred racehorses earlier in the decade. “‘I'm in the wrong spot, get me home.'”

We follow a dipping dirt road with another New Stride volunteer, Shawn Marshall, until we get to a larger pasture where a dozen thoroughbreds mill around under a covered area in the middle of the field. When returned to a herd, the horses naturally revert to a pecking order. “There's not just a number one; there's a number two, three, four, five...” Marshall explains as she helps Bunbury lay down dry hay as bedding for the horses to sleep on tonight.

The top horse is a big brown horse named Jovo, who nudges his letterbox-sized snout against my chest.

“This one is freakishly friendly,” Marshall says. “He thinks he should be on everybody's lap. He just loves to cuddle, but he doesn't realize he's a little too big.”

“The dominant horse can be the tiniest and even the youngest,” Bunbury tells me as she squeezes a tube of antiseptic lotion onto the snout of another horse. “A lot of the time, though, it's an older horse.”

Opponents of racing make the argument that stalls are intrinsically cruel to horses, who graze in herds in the wild. But there's also something about the hierarchical nature of the herd that's unmistakably off-putting: it's like high school. And to my eyes, the life of a submissive horse resembles that of the retainer-wearing video-game guy who eats lunch by himself at his locker.

Marshall points out two horses. One horse stands just outside the covered area staring enviously at the one standing just inside it. “This guy is higher than that guy,” she says, “because that guy has to stand outside.” In other words, the top horse is making the bottom horse stand outside to show he's the top horse. Just because they're horses doesn't meant they can't be jerks.

On the drive home, zooming past bedroom communities and an IKEA store, I begin to worry about my own retirement. I have neither a pension nor any rich relations. What kind of pasture can I afford to put myself out to? When I'm back at my desk, I play with an online retirement calculator, moving up my annual contribution and adjusting inflation rates, and calculate the amount I'll need to avoid eating cat food. My stocks are up on my online simulator, but the real cash in my actual mutual funds are barely at break-even. The horse has taken a bite from my savings, but I'm not faring poorly. If I cut down my expenses, the pantry of my golden years could be upgraded from Whiskas to Fancy Feast. I pull down my to-do list from my corkboard.

1.
BECOME A HOME OWNER
BOUGHT A RACEHORSE

2.
FIND TRUE LOVE
VISITED A BREEDING SHED

3. SETTLE DOWN & START A FAMILY

4. SEE THE WORLD

5. LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE

6. START A RETIREMENT PLAN

7. GET A TATTOO

Blackie has a race this Saturday. Maybe if I win money on her and a few of the other horses, I can cross out number six. I don't need to hit a jackpot, just break even. Not losing money is approximately half as good as winning it.

MOST OF THE horsemen I've met wager infrequently. Training thoroughbreds brings enough risk, and both Randi and Nick seem more inclined to pass an hour calmly coaxing bills and cash vouchers into the slots than cracking a program. Now as an official owner of Blackie, I feel an urge to know the betting window, if only to underscore my connection to the horse. The more I bet on Blackie, the more I care about her.

Farting around the track, I also seek proof of my newfound racing acumen. To this end, I pick up books on racing strategy from used bookstores, but these slender tomes are agonizingly boring—each one presents betting strategy like a sausage factory, where statistics like speed ratings, track biases, and the winning percentages of jockeys and post positions are tossed into the railbird guru's schematic grinder. I want a gambling philosophy that's easier and more intuitive, because I make gut-level decisions and shoot from the hip; I also have a lazy and impatient ass. I turn next to Randi. “When I lived at the track, I had one pocket full of money for betting and one for eating,” she tells me. “If I ever get a moment where I'm not fucking stressed, I'll sit down with you and explain it to you.”

Of course, that moment never comes. In the end, I decide to approach betting from the point of view of a screenwriter trying to shoehorn his movie idea into a three-act structure. After all, what a successful bettor does, Randi tells me, isn't so much guess the best horse, which is what a lucky bettor might do, but correctly visualize how the race will go—the way it'll set up. First, I figure out which horses like to go out front. To do this, I check the program to see where the horse is at the first two sections or “calls” of the race. If there are “1”s and “2”s—if the horse is near the front at the start—then you have a speed horse. Then, I find out which like to grind it out from behind. To do that, I check the program again for horses who are at the back of the race at the beginning—who are in, say, sixth or eighth—before finishing with, say, a “2” or “3.” If there's too much of one type of horse, I go with the other type. And when the field is evenly divided between late and early speed, well, then I just pick a horse and hope I'm smarter than everyone else.

When I show up for Blackie's third race, in the first Saturday of June, something's awry with Randi. A race day is mentally gruelling on trainers, who've done all they can, exercising, massaging, and preparing a horse in the preceding days, and can do little that day beyond worrying. But I know Randi well enough to realize something is profoundly amiss when she's not snarling, but not well enough to tell whether she's angry or depressed.

In truth, she's somewhere in between those moods—plus, she's tired. Hastings held its first Friday night race of the season, and Randi had a horse in the final race, which meant she didn't get home until midnight. That same night, another horse, which she'd nicknamed Oldy, was claimed.

“I had Oldy for only a month, but I thought he was cool. When the owner claimed that horse, people laughed at us, but I thought he had talent and fucking guts,” Randi says in the stall. She wraps bandages around Blackie's feet and holds them in place with three horizontal strips of green tape. “He was a crock”—a gimpy horse—“when I claimed him.” As she had with Blackie, Randi saw the potential in Oldy and figured out what was wrong with his feet, his diet, his thyroid, and his teeth. Randi essentially set up the horse to win, so it chokes her up when Oldy goes on to be the winningest horse that season in Hastings for the next trainer. “A horse like that doesn't come around very often.”