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c h a p t e r e i g h t RACING TODAY Thoroughbreds and the relative merits of racing in the US and the UK were hot topics of conversation throughout my fieldwork, to the extent that I would dread being asked the seemingly innocent question, ‘‘Which do you think is better, American or English racing?’’ The problem was not initiating these discussions, but ending them. Fortunately, I am an anthropologist (what do they know?) and this enabled me to occupy the role of neutral referee when necessary. In an effort to broaden out this question I often asked people how they thought today’s Thoroughbreds compared with those of the past. People were happier to share anxieties about their own Thoroughbreds when they weren’t trying to establish their superiority to those of a rival nation. In Kentucky, the idea that England invented the Thoroughbred and America perfected it was popular, expressed in the notion ‘‘what you started, we finished.’’ However, I was also told that the Thoroughbred was ‘‘not what it once was.’’ In Newmarket, I was warned about repetitive sprint racing and the prevalence of ‘‘performance-enhancing drugs’’ in Kentucky, although English racing was seen as drastically underfunded compared to that of the US. The topics that were of most importance to my informants were the structure of funding, competition with other gambling media, breeding for speed, and medication. Some of the most interesting discussions involved people who were out of place: Europeans in the US and Americans in the UK. This chapter pulls together the insights of all of these groups in comparing British and North American racing and breeding. What future do these makers of racing imagine for their sport? My decision to compare racing and Thoroughbred breeding in the US and the UK was prompted by the insistence of my informants that they were completely 148 h o r s e p e o p l e different, in ways that reflected important contrasts between the two nations. American racing professionals repeatedly told me that they were free from the class restrictions that dominate racing in Britain. In certain ways this proved to be the case. I was encouraged to dress down for racing, to the extent that one trainer phoned me the night before we were to go racing together for the first time to remind me to dress casually, saying, ‘‘No frilly dresses or big hats, Rebecca. This isn’t Ascot!’’ I met all kinds of people from different backgrounds as I wandered around the tracks, from trust fund babies to people who had started with nothing and made a fortune. However, as the previous chapter has shown, despite the range of different entry mechanisms, breeding and owning Thoroughbreds in the US is primarily the preserve of the wealthy, and looking after them is still the job of the least powerful members of society. In the UK, informants claimed that their racing was the most authentic in the world and had preserved the concern with improving the Thoroughbred that had been enshrined in the earliest rules and orders issued by the royal patrons of racing and by the Jockey Club. As evidence of this they pointed to two factors. The first was the variety of racecourses in the UK and the varied distances over which horses ran. This variety preserved a degree of diversity within the breed that had been lost in other countries where speed had been allowed to dominate stamina and robustness. The second indication of the authenticity of racing in the UK was that horses ran and trained without artificial stimulants of any kind. In both cases, informants emphasized what they referred to as ‘‘sport,’’ in contrast to the commercial motives they saw at work in the US. Racing in the UK combines both commercial and sporting aspects, and the contrast drawn between the US and the UK is not so sharp as either group imagines. differences There are 175 racecourses in the United States. Thoroughbred flat racing (as opposed to races between trotting horses) takes place at about one hundred of these. In the United Kingdom there are 59 racecourses. Seventeen of them stage flat racing only; twenty-four run only jump races. Eighteen stage both. There are four allweather tracks (AWT), similar in construction to tracks in the US. Great Leighs, an AWT just outside London, is the first new racecourse to be built in the UK since 1927. The US holds the...

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