I watched the Derby yesterday for the first time in years and holy shit is John right that the only thing whiter is a Klan rally (or a Republican convention), but the jockeys are a major exception. Lots of Latinos were riding, and the winning jockey, Mario Gutierrez, gave a nice shout out to his mom in Mexico. At one point, the local station showing the Derby inserted a Spanish-language National Guard ad. I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad in Spanish on a local station, so someone must think that the Derby is a big event for Hispanics.
Obviously, I know nothing about the sport of horse racing, so maybe this is common knowledge, but are Latinos big racing fans just to watch the jockeys? Also, too: the irony of having an immigrant ride the winner the biggest sporting event in one of the most anti-immigration states in the union seems to have been lost in all the commentary I saw.
piratedan
good thing he didn’t fall and get hurt, they may have refused treatment at the local hosp if they determined he was a freeloading immigrant here to parasite on some of our freedoms.
NotMax
Don’t tell anyone, but that is North Korea’s secret cunning plan – – to nutritionally deprive their populace for generation after generation until they can take over the business and have a North Korean jockey on every single racehorse.
Or not.
FridayNext
You know what is also lost in all the commentary I see at Triple Crown events? All of this is about gambling. They’ll mention odds, but other than that you’d think they gave a shit about the horses which are getting injured in record numbers on America’s race tracks, and therefore put down. These races are about nothing but gambling. I have nothing against gambling, but they should admit that’s what it is and let the rest of us go back to playing online poker and cut the hypocrisy.
RossInDetroit
One thing I noticed when visiting the rural Southwest was that EVERY person handling livestock was Hispanic. I mentioned this to a friend in ABQ and he remarked that Roy Rogers cowboys were a myth and the real wrangling has always been done by much darker people.
Jockeys of course are a different matter but I wonder there’s a link.
Sullivan Hyde
I won’t watch that s#!+. The horses get injured/killed way too often, and gambling grosses me out. Cool that it’s racist too, so I have another excuse.
KariQ
Yes, the majority of grooms and (I think) jockeys in the country are Hispanic. Many are from Mexico, but there are also lots of Panamanian, Costa Rican, and South American grooms and jockeys. Go to any track in the country, but especially the West, and you’ll need to speak Spanish to communicate with the workers.
Freddie deBoer
Well, remember that jockeys need to be unusually small, and remember that unusually small people come disproportionately from countries with high poverty rates, due to the effects of malnutrition on growth. There aren’t a lot of jockeys from the Netherlands.
Yevgraf
I blame the whiteness of the Derby crowd on the prettification of Churchill Downs. It used to be a lot more diverse, but they took out big chunks of the local shitty neighborhood, spruced up the track, aimed for expensive food and beverage vending. As a result, an affordable downscale entertainment became something a lot less fun.
I’ll hit CD maybe twice this spring, despite huge family connections to the place. I miss the cigar chomping peanut eaters, the compulsive gamblers with no money and no sense, the families of rednecks with screaming kids and coolers, the has-been hustlers. That was all part of the culture, and white bread gentrification design to suck in the bucks of status-seeking upper middle class social climbers ruined it.
When I go anymore, I pick a random weekday – I can see a shadow of the former crowd then.
Jamey
I stopped watching the Derby when I learnt that they don’t go 500 laps.
maya
Don’t forget there’s fierce competition in the my Japanese landscaper is better than your Hispanic landscaper too.
Anya
Can we have a thread on l’élection présidentielle française de 2012, pretty please?
dr. bloor
Just think “animated lawn jockey” and it will all make sense, ‘mix.
Schlemizel
@dr. bloor:
You are not that far off there. In the “good old days” Young slave boys were the jockeys that rode the masters horses. DOn’t know when that ended (I assume it lasted well into the Jim Crow days) but eventually they switched to small framed men & the riders became white. My guess is the money is not that good we know the work is dangerous and hard so its not surprising to see the work go to those on the fringe of society.
Try as I might I just can’t give a squirt about horse racing and seeing a lot of empty outfits attempting to recreate the faux gentility of that deservedly dead era is too sad to contemplate
Nicole
Schlemizel is is right; it’s true that most of the great jockeys of the 19th century were black. By mid-20th century, most were white, and sometime in the 1960’s to early 1970’s South American and Latin American riders began a rise to prominence. A fair number of big jockeys also come from Cajun country (Borel, Albarado).
The money for top jockeys is actually quite good- Gutierrez earned a little over $100,000 for his two-minute ride. Jockeys, like trainers, get a percentage of the horse’s winnings (I think it’s ten percent of the purse, same as the trainer gets). If the horse doesn’t win, they get a small fee for riding in the race.
It’s a very dangerous occupation; they aren’t covered by workman’s comp because it’s not a case of if they’ll be injured; it’s when and how bad, so companies are permitted to refuse to cover them. But many jockeys have careers that span several decades, so in that respect, they have a longer career than athletes in other sports. Mike Smith, who rode second place Bodemeister (Smith is even better known as Zenyatta’s jockey) is 46. Pat Day rode until he was 51.
I’m not sure the nutrition theory holds up- it’s not the jockey’s height that is important; it’s his weight. For a jockey to have a long career he needs to be able to keep his weight low, and I think they say that people malnourished when young have a higher chance of being obese later, right?
I wish the chauvinism in the sport wasn’t so strong- while there are many, many female exercise riders, there are few female jockeys, and as women are naturally lighter than men, it seems it would lead to less abuse of their bodies to stay light. Rosie Napravnik, who won the Kentucky Oaks the day before the Derby (on a 19-1 shot!), is absolutely amazing, and it made me nuts she wasn’t in the Derby.
But getting mad about rich white horse owners is like getting mad about rich white football team owners.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Nicole: You and Schlemizel are both spot-on. If you or anyone ever wanted to know more, check out “Too Black, Too Fast” if it comes anywhere near you. The link is specifically about the exhibition hosted by my school earlier this year, but the producers have a link of their own.
WereBear
@FridayNext: Or football, basketball; name me a major sport that doesn’t care who got injured yesterday, and I’ll tell you who isn’t kept afloat by professional gambling.
Actually, it’s the opposite. Look at the Rolling Stones; they all grew up in the austere post-WWII era in Britain. And this is why Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weaponry.*
*Wayne’s World 2 joking reference.
Yevgraf
I do want to call out bullshit on this. Despite all the national conservative activist rhetoric, you’ve not seen any big groundswell in Kentucky on immigration measures. The productive agricultural ruralities need the labor, the unproductive redneck ruralities in Eastern Kentucky don’t have immigrant populations, and the largest urban area is extremely blue. We’re fucked up in many ways due to the nonproductive ruralities, but immigration, thankfully, isn’t one of them.
Louisville has long been very immigrant friendly, and growing more diverse all the time. In my own office, we’ve got a religious and ethnic mix of professionals that includes white, black, Hispanic, Bosnian, Pakistani, Muslim, Catholic, atheist, Jewish and garden variety Protestant. What’s more, we’re not that unique.
KariQ
In passing, I don’t know how things are in the rest of the country, but the audience for horse racing in California is not exclusively, or even predominantly, white. There always seem to be far more minorities – Hispanics, Asians, and blacks – than whites watching the races. The owners are largely white, of course that’s because it takes lots of money to own a racehorse, even the ones that were never Derby hopefuls, and that is still concentrated in white hands. But the sport isn’t as lily white as the coverage of the Derby may lead you to believe.
Face
I just washed a load of Jockeys
Jaime
Out here in SoCal, thoroughbred racing- & ethnicity-wise, there’s also the signal irony that one of the top jockeys, Corey Nakatani, had parents interned on the grounds of Santa Anita racetrack, where he spent most of his career racing.
Brachiator
@Freddie deBoer:
Uh, no. Horse racing is also big in the UK, and in Hong Kong (former Crown Colony and all that). Jockeys are considered to be celebrities, and have an strong appeal to upper class women into the equestrian thing. Read a few Dick Francis mysteries.
As a couple of other posters have noted, many jockeys, and trainers were black. The crass and despicable lawn jockeys are relics of that earlier era. Jim Crow era demands that free blacks be kept out of professions that could let them earn big money pushed blacks out of this end of the industry. And of course, blacks could not be accepted as owners or as part of the social scene.
Brachiator
Some historical background:
The accomplishments of African-American horsemen in the early years of the sport are often forgotten, but in the years between the Civil War and the turn of the century, they were very influential. In the first Kentucky Derby Aristides was trained by African-American Ansel Williamson and guided to victory by Oliver Lewis, one of 15 black jockeys in that race. Over all, 15 of the first 28 Kentucky Derbys were won by black jockeys and 5 were trained by black trainers.
After the turn of the century, racing started to be a higher profile sport, and blacks were mostly seen only as stable help. The last black jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, Jimmy Winkfield who won in both 1901 and 1902, left the US for Europe and a lucrative racing career where it is rumoured he even rode for the Czar of Russia. He became fluent in several languages before he retired with over 2300 winners to his credit.
Most famous of the black jockeys by far is Isaac Murphy who is considered one of the greatest riders in American history. He was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbys and won an astonishing 44% of all races he rode. That record has not been approached by any other jockey since. He was the first jockey to be inducted into the Jockey Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Racing. Sadly, his career was cut short at the age of 34 when he died of pneumonia. He always had trouble staying at the light weight demanded of a jockey and was known to binge and purge. It has been speculated that it was vomit backing up in his lungs that caused the pneumonia which led to his death. He is buried next to Man O’ War in the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington.
Mont D. Law
May I suggest
“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”
http://brianb.freeshell.org/a/kddd.pdf
Sorry I don’t have time to find the non-pdf link.
PatrickG
Also calling bullshit on referring to Kentucky as one of the most anti-immigrant states in the nation.
Five minutes with Teh Google:
– 2011: SB 6, the Arizona-style bill, passed by Senate. In response, House passes HB-3, which focuses on employer penalties for failing to check immigration status. Neither bill survives the other house. No legislation enacted.
– 2012: SB 118 (requiring tougher citizenship checks for public benefits) passed in the Senate, and died in the Assembly House Local Government Committee. No legislation enacted.
So yes, there’s crazy people in positions of power in Kentucky, and I’m not trying to minimize that at all (hello Williams!). But you might want to think twice before you rank Kentucky with the other states that have actually enacted legislation.
PatrickG
On the actual topic, I was at the Oaks and Derby, and on-the-ground reports confirm that the Earth’s local albedo was significantly increased on those days due to lack of pigmented skin.
The majority of African Americans I saw were outside hawking NObama t-shirts. Probably made a bunch of money, too. On the other hand, some of the best hats we saw were worn by black women.
Beauzeaux
@Freddie deBoer:
Wondering when someone would mention it. Jockeys have to be small. There were quite a few Americans small enough to be jockeys after WWII. (Shoemaker, Arcaro) Now we have to look to other nations where (1) they are interested in horse racing and (2) a lot of adults weigh around 115 pounds.
Haydnseek
@KariQ: You’re right. I’ve been going to Santa Anita and occasionally Hollywood Park for 40 years, and the mix is just as you describe. The Derby isn’t representative of day-to-day racing, it’s a see and be seen social event. Racing has a lot of serious problems these days, but to those of us who love it these problems seem solvable; possibly another symptom of the misplaced optimism of the hard core horseplayer. I know, ’cause I’m on of ’em.
dj spellchecka
i watched for the first time in ages and was most surprised by a national ad for a website [possibly run by churchill
downs] that let people bet on the race..
Heliopause
I’m a little surprised that all the FPers seem to have never seen a crowd shot at any other sporting event.
WaynersT
I too call bullshit on the anti immigration claims. That’s not Kentucky. Agriculture and Horse Racing and too big and too dependent. We may be screwed on a bunch of issues but immigration isn’t one of them. We were a neutral border state in the civil war, then joined the union -so don’t lump us in with the other idiots to the south.
We got a Noah’s Ark theme park to worry about!!!
brettvk
@Brachiator: I’ve been catching up with the “Stuff you Missed in History Class” podcast on the How Stuff Works website, and they did a show on Winkfield last May (#106 on their iTunes list). One of his wives was a minor Russian aristocrat, and I guess they had to sidle out of the country during the Revolution since horse racing had been a vice of the upper classes.
shano
Jockeys have a really good union through the HBPA or the Jockeys Club.
I always had very good group health insurance at the racetrack.
English racing has a different weight scale so the jockeys are bigger. Thats why Steve Cauthen went to ride in England after winning the Derby here as a teen. European racing is much more interesting than American dirt tracks, but they are starting to built, test and use new improved surfaces for racing….
One of the best track surfaces in the US is in Camden, S.C. Built by the Duponts, it was dug down to the bedrock and special layers of clay from Texas and dirt from other places were shipped in.
But turf racing on the old courses is really the safest going for horse racing. They do not run as fast on the turf and that may be another factor for safety.
Paul in KY
I watched local coverage of Derby and you’d think the whole day was about hats.
Sanjuro
Last time I checked the Kentucky Derby is actually run in Kentucky not Arizona or Texas or Alabama or Georgia. Those states have actually been in the news for their anti-immigration stances. Next time you feel the need to denigrate a state for something, please provide some factual basis for the spew or otherwise I will lose respect for your opinion.