A Day at the Races

Image by my co-worker, Karina Kravchik

I don't know why I'm writing about this, except that it is what people do with a journal, write down the stuff that happens to them.

So yesterday my office had an "offsite," sort of a corporate down day, at a racetrack. To me, the track isn't the place to go to have fun with work mates, it is the place that the "gambling addicted husband goes and blows all the money his wife gave him to buy a new suit for an interview so he can finally get a job and get out of this rut" in made for television movies starring Tori Spelling.

The track... it is exactly like a tiny, cruddy little airport. Out in the middle of nowhere, long flat place where you can get beer but no coffee, with little trucks running around, some person on a PA announcing changes to race schedules in a distant voice, and more people sitting around with that certain combination of boredom and intensity than there should be, as if they were trapped here by circumstance, knowing that they are lost, but with no place left to go.

So they put us in this little VIP area, gave us a buffet of airplane food, and an open bar. My co-workers, being data people, lamented the lack of availability of computers with MS Excel so that we could load the tables containing jockey ranking, horse height and weight stats, owner ranks, given odds, etc, and properly sort and rank the data, perhaps using a pivot table. At first they charted it out as best they could on cocktail napkins, and placed cautious bets. But as the afternoon wore on, and the skilled bartender mixed stiffer and stiffer drinks, the wall of nerd eroded, and they started drunkenly betting on horses based on the horse's name. Eventually a 36 to 1 long shot came in, a co-worker earned $75 on a $2 bet, and after that, everyone was encouraged to make seriously silly wagers. This goes to prove my theory that drunk people can not do math, and allows me to pencil in "horse racing is a big racket."

About this time, I went down to the track itself, and watched them bring the horses in and parade them around. That made the drive down there worthwhile. The horses are incredible animals, not an ounce of fat on them, the net of veins just under the skin, the long limbs and the masses of muscle... these animals are strong strong strong. The trainers would take them in the circle and you could see that some would dig their elbow into the horse's neck, or pull down on the bridle and not allow the horse to control his head. These horses would have strange wild eyes, and their tongues were lolling out, and froth was coming from the corner of their mouths, and all the while you could see that the horse just wanted to be let loose, maybe to run, but maybe just to go eat grass, I don't know. But it seemed to me that a few of the horses had the look of animals that had been pushed right to the edge, ready to do what it took, ready to go now, a look I've seen before in boxers on TV. They have issues, maybe momma didn't hug them, but those issues are your problem, because when that bell rings... somebody is going down.

The people down by the little horse ring were oblivious to anything that didn't affect the race. These people actually had laptops up with excel loaded (actually, probably a third party specific horse-ranking software, like "Horse-Sense V8.0" or something.) They had charts and graphs and papers and sheets that looked a thousand years old and pens behind their ears. They were shouting to each other in some strange track slang, an incomprehensible wry inside comment would cause a quick bit of laughter, but then it would quickly dissolve into uneasy quiet as everyone went back to glaring at each other with distrust. It was like the Sharks and the Jets, with somebody just itching to pull a switchblade. After a bit I went over by the track and watched the races go by.

From this vantage point, just few feet away from the horses running, I could not see the whole race, like we could from the corporate box where my co-workers were getting increasingly louder, down here, you could see just the last few seconds. It is impressive, the horse hooves make the ground shake, mud flies everywhere, and you realize that there is some serious speed involved. From here, you can see the hook finally, how someone could do this for a living, how someone could come to love it.

When the races were over, the jockeys would come by, covered in mud, looking like old lustful children carved out of wood.

It was from down here that the cupcake got its icing, so to speak. Down here I realized that racing just isn't, and never will be, for me. As the race finished, there was a huge cheer from my co-workers, who had picked the correct horse (probably because of his name, or number, or something arbitrary,) and all the serious horse people looked up at them. They knew that the winning jockey had commited some egregious horse-foul, and was certain to be disqualified, and that my co-workers were clearly too ignorant to realize that they were celebrating prematurely.

One of the jockeys looked up at my celebrating co workers and clicked his tongue in disgust and said "The next time they take a day off, they should do it when the track is closed."