Chapter Text
If you got into horse racing through Uma Musume and eventually discovered that the actual sport is somehow even more complicated than the game makes it look, this is for you.
Most of it will probably be about American racing, because that is where the majority of my knowledge and interests are, but I am absolutely not limiting myself to one country, one era, or even strictly “history.” There will be historical stuff, current racing, individual horses, jockeys, trainers, famous races, obscure races, bloodlines, rules, terminology, controversies, racing culture, weird incidents, industry changes, and whatever else I decide deserves several thousand words.
There will also be chapters about things happening now. If something interesting happens in modern racing and I want to explain the context around it, I probably will. This is not intended to be a chronological textbook where we start in 1665 and slowly work our way toward the Breeders’ Cup. I would die before reaching 1900.
Think of it more as a reference book where I am allowed to get distracted.
You do not need to know anything about actual horse racing before reading this. I am going to assume that some people reading know racing extremely well, some know enough to recognize the Triple Crown, and some know that Special Week is a horse girl and have recently discovered with some alarm that she—or rather, he—was a real animal.
To be upfront, I am also not going to force an Uma Musume connection into subjects where there isn’t one. The point is to make real racing accessible to people who came to it through Uma Musume, not to awkwardly staple anime references onto every horse that ever lived.
There will obviously be subjects where the connection is much more direct. Japanese breeding history is basically impossible to discuss for very long without running headfirst into American and European bloodlines. Sunday Silence alone could probably keep me occupied indefinitely. There are also horses, families, races, and historical events that become a lot more interesting once you know the real context behind the names you see in Uma Musume.
But I also want this to be somewhere I can talk about racing for its own sake.
Full disclosure, horse racing has an enormous history, and not all of it is pretty. There will probably be chapters dealing with injuries, deaths, discrimination, exploitation, corruption, drugging, gambling scandals, animal welfare, and other subjects that come with discussing the sport honestly. I will tag or warn for particularly upsetting material where it makes sense.
I am also going to try very hard to distinguish between things we actually know and things that have been repeated so many times that everybody has collectively decided they must be true. Horse racing history is full of the latter.
There are horses whose personalities have been reduced to one anecdote. There are famous quotes that apparently materialized out of thin air sometime in 1987. There are stories that change slightly every time somebody tells them. There are statistics repeated without sources, newspaper accounts that contradict each other, and retrospective versions of races that bear only a passing resemblance to what people were saying when the race actually happened. This work will, in part, hopefully undo some of the common misconceptions that spread like wildfire.
I also take requests. If there is a horse, race, jockey, trainer, bloodline, racing term, historical event, controversy, or general “what the hell does this mean?” question you want covered, leave it in the comments. It does not have to involve an existing Uma Musume character, but it certainly can. American racing requests are especially welcome, including obscure ones. But that doesn’t mean I’ll only do American racing requests. The sky is limitless.
I cannot promise I will know the answer immediately, but researching bizarre horse racing questions is approximately 80% of the reason this exists.
Chapters will also probably appear in absolutely no sensible order.
One update may be a serious piece about Black jockeys in nineteenth-century American racing. The next may be an explanation of claiming races. The one after that may be 20,000 words about a horse who won three allowances at Aqueduct in 1974 and whom twelve living people remember.
That is the intended experience.
I mostly just want this to be a place where people can learn about the parts of racing that catch their interest and then, ideally, get way too invested in them. You do not need to memorize pedigrees or know every stakes schedule or understand why somebody is still complaining about a ride from 1976. That part tends to happen on its own.
With all that being said, welcome to horse racing. Hopefully, by the end of this, you too will be mad about something that happened at Aqueduct fifty years ago.