Years ago, horse racing was always in the newspapers and there were journalists that were as well versed in the sport as today's most rabid baseball fans who can rattle off the most obscure statistics. But times have changed since the days of Seabiscuit's front page large bold headlines that loaded the stands at racetracks across the nation.
On Kentucky Derby Day, Sports Illustrated posted a video that made several serious factual errors with its web page story, “Already Dreaming wins Kentucky Derby.” Again, this is Sports Illustrated–not some obscure website. The video claimed that (1) it cost $150,000 per month to keep a Thoroughbred, (2) that Tapit never won on the racetrack (he won the GI Wood Memorial and Laurel Futurity), (3) Tapit produced a Kentucky Derby winner (not true as of yet), and that (4) since retiring from the track, American Pharoah has bred 100 mares (he bred 208 in his first season alone).
It is hard to imagine a major publication 100 years ago or 75 years ago making such major misstatements about the sport. Quick–who is the heavyweight champion of the world? I bet 99% of those that read this letter don't know. And that's a problem for boxing. The industry should be worried.
Horse racing is a great sport, but there is a lot wrong with horse racing today. One of them is it has fallen off the sports pages, which in turn makes it hard to get back in them, since people stopped following and have no interest. This is a classic feedback loop, where the more the industry falls out of the sports pages, the harder it becomes to get back into them. When people are interested in horse racing as a sport, when it forms part of the common culture, the value to the industry is enormous.
If tomorrow, someone took over the heavyweight championship of the world, truth is very few Americans would care about it and most would not even know. Years ago, people would not stop talking about it.
When a major publication such as Sports Illustrated gets so much wrong about some of the most basic facts of horse racing because they are using people that are obviously unfamiliar with the sport, those that have a stake in horse racing really need to take heart. Sure horse racing is gambling. But is also sports and pageantry, which is its one major advantage over other forms of gaming. To the extent it loses that advantage, the industry will have problems.
It is supposed that the big shots in the industry might simply rule off Sports Illustrated factual errors as just some odd, random occurrence. But that is just being in denial. It's much worse than some random factual blooper: it is an indicator that while the sport is still significant enough for a prestigious magazine that is solely dedicated to sports to cover its premier race, horse racing is unimportant enough to not hire journalists that understand even the most basic things about the sport. It is the proverbial canary in the coal mine that the sport may be heading towards irrelevance to most Americans.
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