What if you could get a tip on this week’s Belmont Stakes straight from the horse’s mouth? Valuable inside dope of how the nags are feeling? How they think workouts have gone? Whether there might be an intimidation factor favoring an opponent?
This assumes, beyond the old saw, that horses can talk. Also, that they would want to share any personal information. A half-century of work as a sports journalist taught me that elite athletes don’t necessarily care to offer their thoughts about the big game. To inquiries regarding insight on one’s performance, a common jock’s retort often goes something like, “You saw it.”
In 2008, when Big Brown was a major sports story—winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness leading up to the final leg of the Triple Crown at Belmont—the satiric news source The Onion spoofed Big Brown’s “arrogant refusal to speak to reporters.”
No bon mots from him. The flip side of such silence was offered by Frank Vuono, whose 16w marketing company was handling Big Brown’s lucrative licensing deals at the time. “There is no question we attach human qualities” to fine thoroughbreds, Vuono told me—traits such as courage, intelligence, honesty and heart. And the fact the horses “don’t talk back,” he said, “makes them perfect clients” and, as an added bonus, keeps them from offending anyone.
My late Newsday colleague Bill Nack once described the “borderline mythic” treatment of 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat being due, in part, to the fact that he was “this gorgeous mute who came along who was totally honest; all you had to do was feed him and train him and he’d do what you asked.”
Just as humans often are granted the appellation of “hero,” based solely on the ability to hit a home run, dunk a basketball or make an unexpected game-saving play, so do four-legged winners of sporting contests tend to be somehow admired. They don’t go into burning buildings to save babies, yet they often are ascribed the qualities of goodness and determination. As if an inbred ability to run fast indicated a never-give-up valor.
One of my first racetrack assignments in the fun-and-games business resulted from my curiosity regarding the difference in training processes between human and equine racers. A horse, I was reminded then by the best thoroughbred coaches, doesn’t know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole. They can’t be coaxed to workouts based on the lure of world records or fame. They can’t be threatened with, as one trainer put it, “Look. I’m going to kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.”
Still, there’s the Mr. Ed thing, the anthropomorphization of critters, the urge to sort of put ourselves in the animals’ shoes. To suppose what they might be thinking.
A recent takeoff in the New Yorker presented this year’s Kentucky Derby in the purported words of the race’s participants. So Country House, eventually declared the winner of that controversial event, described his confusion in how “everyone was running like mad. On my back was a tiny man dressed like a bumblebee. He had a stick and he was hitting my ass. Which was weird.”
The piece obviously was done for laughs, with Long Range Toddy admitting, “I don’t love running. I think walking at a brisk pace can give you the same kind of cardio with much less stress on your body.” And War of Will making the point that “my name is Greg, not War or Will. I don’t know what that even means or why people call me that.”
Not to disparage horse sense, but the truth is that thoroughbreds—1,500 pounds of muscle and speed—have brains the size of a walnut. They run 35 miles per hour on ankles the size of human ankles, with men on their backs—not a recipe for relaxed sprinting—so it is pretty clear that what you see on the track is what you get. And don’t expect an interview process would produce any more enlightenment about the race’s turning point or strategy or horse expectations.
Maybe a neigh or a whinny. But anyone claiming more from the horse’s mouth is hearing voices. Anyway, when Maximum Security became the first Kentucky Derby winner to be disqualified for interference in the race’s 145-year history, I strongly suspect he would have had only one thing to say.
“No comment.”