The Sport of Kings

Travel Guide

The world of horse racing in Kentucky

Welcome to the decadent South:

The neighbor’s tobacco plants extend as far as the boy can see, so that impossibly varying shades of green seem to comprise the known world, the undulating earth an expanse of green sea dotted only by black-ship tobacco barns, a green so penetrating, it promises a cool, fertile core a mile beneath his feet.

The world of horses – Kentucky Derby Museum

This is a world where horse racing, the brutal world of control and hard training is a world where the horses have no freedom, no choice to do the back breaking work they do, are at the mercy of their masters:

That the horse has true and false floating ribs. That it has 205 bones in its body, the chestnuts on the backs of the limbs being remnants of the ancient horse alive in the modern; that, like a human, the horse sweats when it’s nervous. That I am as trapped as any Thoroughbred.

The world of horse racing is like the world of slavery in any ways – freedom is all anyone, any animal longs for. Forced breeding is never right no matter if you are man or beast. What about what happens to those horses, those slaves who don’t do what they are told?
Racism rears its ugly head:

“The problem, Henry, as I have always seen it, is that the Negro is fundamentally a child, and children are incapable of understanding their own inferiority. Indeed, they generally err on the side of grandiose delusion.