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c h a p t e r f o u r THE CENTERS OF THE WORLD No two places in the world are more closely associated with the Thoroughbred than are Newmarket and Lexington. Other large-scale producers of Thoroughbreds —Ocala, Florida; The Curragh, Ireland; Chantilly, France; New South Wales, Australia —provide services including racing, training, and sales facilities, but these lack the same degree of international recognition. Newmarket and Lexington boast a historical association with the Thoroughbred and a contemporary identity that seeks to preserve that link: Newmarket is referred to as ‘‘Headquarters,’’ or simply ‘‘HQ,’’ and Lexington has recently fought for the right to call itself the ‘‘Horse Capital of the World.’’ Both places are uniquely suited to their roles as industry leaders, making use of considerable social, geographical, geological, and political capital that has accrued to them over time. In fact, the two towns were officially twinned on 5 April 2003. For Thoroughbred breeders, Newmarket and Lexington are the centers of the world.∞ The Jockey Club established their rooms on Newmarket High Street in the mideighteenth century. Although the Jockey Club now has offices in London, they remain the principal landowner in the area. There are two racecourses in Newmarket , the Rowley Mile, which was recently remodeled at a cost of £16 million ($29.5 million), and the July Course; there are seventy training stables and sixty stud farms. Many of racing’s most important service providers (trainers, jockeys, bloodstock agents, auctioneers, lawyers, accountants) as well as committees and institutions (Thoroughbred Breeders Association, European Breeders Fund, International Racing Bureau, Equine Fertility Unit, Horseracing Forensic Laboratory, British Racing School, Federation of Bloodstock Agents, Animal Health Trust, National Horse- t h e c e n t e r s o f t h e w o r l d 55 racing Museum) are based in the town. About a third of the adult population in Newmarket work in the racing industry.≤ Kentucky has been a producer of Thoroughbreds at least since the first advertisement for a Thoroughbred stallion appeared in the pages of the Kentucky Gazette in 1787. The state has five Thoroughbred racetracks (Keeneland, Turfway Park, Churchill Downs, Ellis Park, Kentucky Downs) and 460 horse farms in the area around Lexington called the Blue Grass. Like Newmarket, it is also the base of a large number of support services, subsidiary industries, and professional organizations, including the Kentucky Horse Park (a 1,200-acre equine theme park and location of the International Museum of the Horse), the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority, the Jockey Club (which also has an office in New York), the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation, the Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research Center, and the North American Racing Academy, as well as racing newspapers The Blood-Horse and the Thoroughbred Times. The scale of operations in the two towns is considerably different. There are about four thousand Thoroughbreds resident in Newmarket and its environs at any given time. Approximately half of these are in training, in the care of the seventy licensed trainers who operate from the stables in and around the town. The remainder is breeding stock on the stud farms of the surrounding countryside. In contrast, at the peak of the breeding season approximately thirty thousand Thoroughbreds can be found on the farms around Lexington. The horses in training housed at each of the five racetracks boost this population. Kentucky is the leading state in the North American bloodstock industry, the largest market for Thoroughbreds in the world. The town of Newmarket produces yearlings for the smaller European market. The two centers differ in scale and in orientation: Newmarket is a national center of administration, breeding, and training; Kentucky is a nursery for the Thoroughbreds of the world, as well as an administrative center for racing and breeding in North America.≥ The explanations offered by my informants for the dominance of Newmarket and Lexington in their respective roles are interestingly contrasting. Thoroughbred breeders moved to Newmarket in order to exert their influence over the political process, relocating from farms further north where the first Thoroughbreds had been born. Their presence in Newmarket today is explained by the existence of an infrastructure and set of services, as well as a trained workforce that makes relocation hard to contemplate. In Lexington, informants invoked the unique topography and geology of the inner Blue Grass in order to account for the presence of the breeding industry. They explained that...

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