As the OMFGstyle.com sports authority, I can’t help thinking about horse racing at this time of year—the Triple Crown to be exact. Three races starting with the Kentucky Derby in May, the Preakness two weeks later, and the Belmont Stakes three weeks after that.
There’s lots of pageantry, the horses are beautiful and graceful; the ladies’ hats are wild, especially at the Derby; and the mint juleps flow freely. And millions of dollars are at stake for the winners.
As a horse crazy kid who rode some amazing ex-race horses, I followed these races closely, and am old enough to have watched some of the great Triple Crown winners of all time—Secretariat’s 31-length romp in the Belmont, Affirmed’s three by-a-nose victories over Alydar.
But this isn’t about who the favorites are this year, or how many furlongs there are in a mile (there are eight), or the fact that there hasn’t been a Triple Crown winner since 1978.
The horses in these races are three years old. They’ve been ridden since they were one, and they started racing at two. They don’t mature physically until they are five, so it’s like having your 10-year-old child run three marathons in six weeks after two years of training. Sounds cruel, right? It is.
Why don’t the rules get changed? Because investors who own race horses want to make money, and the longer they have to feed and train young horses before those horses can begin to pay for themselves, the less likely it is that they will get their investment back. That and there’s the old argument, “this is the way we’ve always done it.”
What’s the difference between this and pushing a child to train for a sport like gymnastics or figure skating? The horses can’t ever say no.
This year, put on a big hat, sip a mint julep (or two), but instead of hitting the track to place a bet, maybe you can take that money and put it to use helping ex-race horses find good homes… There are rescue organizations like Canter that do outstanding work with very limited budgets.
