Does the Kentucky Derby Prove Eugenics?
19 of 20 entrants were descendants of Secretariat.
Horse racing used to be a colossal sport in the United States, partly because it was one of the few acceptable venues for betting.
Nowadays, you don’t have to follow the Sport of Kings to wager. So horse racing is fading as a day to day recreation.
On the other hand, the Kentucky Derby seems to be doing fine in the Instagram age in which an ever-growing number of affluent people want to snap selfies of themselves at global superstar events like the Derby. Hunter S. Thompson and Jagger & Richards helped capture the enduring allure of the Kentucky Derby:
But horse racing was also a big deal because, as Tolstoy noted in Anna Karenina, breeding faster horses had been an English obsession for hundreds of years.
Fast horses were a national security priority. Shakespeare complained in Henry V about how slow the English jades were at Agincourt compared to the brilliant French chargers.
When I looked up how Shakespeare used the word “race,” it became obvious, as I wrote in 2021:
Central to Shakespeare’s various uses of “race” are horses, their racing and their breeding, which tended to blur in the English mind. The old French word “haras” for stud farm had become the Italian razza, the Spanish raza and the French and English word “race.”
This led to an equine double meaning: A race is what horses run, and race describes breeds and families and lineages and pedigrees, whether horsey or human. It’s sort of a pun on the part of Shakespeare (and the English language), but he’s also calling attention to the similarity between horse breeding and human breeding, especially royal or noble lines. …
The British have been notoriously crazy about horses and horse racing for a very long time, although medieval English horses weren’t terribly fast. Shakespeare’s Henry V contrasts the brilliant French warhorses with the broken-down English jades at the battle of Agincourt in 1415.
A long effort to import better Arabian and Turkish sires, such as the Byerley Turk, and to carefully breed them eventually led to the foundation of the world-conquering thoroughbred breed in the 18th century. By Victorian times, horse racing was seen around the world as quintessentially English. In countries like Argentina, the Jockey Club was the redoubt of the Anglophile faction. From the 18th-century English Agricultural Revolution’s obsession with artificial selection of livestock emerged the key British scientific breakthrough of the 19th century: Darwin’s theory of natural selection. …
Other uses of race in reference to humans tend to be genealogical: race as dynasty. For example, in Richard III (V, 3), the princes in the tower tell the future King Henry VII:
Live, and beget a happy race of kings!
Much note was made on Twitter …
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