A Day at the Races

LAST WEEK a friend and I made our way to Hollywood Park to watch a horserace--for the first time in our lives. Anticipating the glamour of the sport of kings, we found the charm of a littered Greyhound Bus terminal. Horseracing now is a bygone sport, a washed-up relic of the days when people thronged to the track in their smartest clothes to see equine stars of fabulous speed and beauty.

Such a horse was Seabiscuit, who ran during the late 1930s. Millions of fans followed his exploits by radio, and tens of thousands turned up at the tracks every time he ran. The horse's story was a classic one of triumph over adversity, as Gary Ross makes clear in his new film version of "Seabiscuit," based on Laura Hillenbrand's bestselling book, "Seabiscuit: An American Legend."

Back when Seabiscuit was thundering around the track, horseracing in America was in its golden age. Mechanical starting gates, saliva testing for doping, totalizator boards, and photo-finish cameras brought the sport into the modern era, and horseracing was one of the only industries not affected by the Depression. Legal betting suited down-on-their-luck citizens, and state governments eagerly accepted tax revenues from parimutuel gambling. Between 1929 and 1939, twenty-four new tracks were built across the country, an increase of over 70 percent. The racetracks were places to be seen for the social smart set and movie stars. Record crowds would turn out to see such star horses as War Admiral and Omaha.

As the sport became entrenched in the general culture, it also became a staple in movie theaters. Not only would theaters show newsreels of the races, but an astonishing number of Hollywood feature films focused on horseracing. In the 1930s alone, at least 115 movies featured horseracing of some kind. The sport found its way into such franchise cinema as the Marx Brothers' "A Day at the Races" (1937) and "Charlie Chan at the Racetrack" (1936), and it was the subject of screwball comedies, family dramas, and musicals.

For most of these films, the themes were the same. They capitalized on the notion that horseracing was a redemptive sport that could save one from financial troubles--and, more important, rehabilitate the reputations of both the horse and rider. Take "National Velvet" (1944), for instance, perhaps the archetypal horseracing movie. In that film, twelve-year-old Elizabeth Taylor stepped into movie history by cutting her hair short, donning jockey silks, and riding a horse called "The Pie" in the Grand National, a prestigious British hurdle race. Her fall from the horse only seconds before she reaches the winning post loses her the winner's trophy and purse. But that scarcely matters. Velvet rides purely because she believes in her horse, a beast she has tamed out of its obstreperousness with great dollops of love and trust.

"National Velvet" is a sentimental Hollywood confection that today seems cloying, but the notion of the purse being an adjunct to the rehabilitative powers of the track is a staple of horse films before and since. Such movies as "Broadway Bill" (1934), "Pride of the Bluegrass" (1939), "The Great Mike" (1944), and "Black Gold" (1947) were all tales of men, shunned by society, who managed to find redemption through a steed's run around the track. Occasionally an interesting horseracing movie would burst through, like the brooding "Boots Malone" (1952), a noir look at the world of jockeys, or "The Return of October" (1948), about a girl who believes her horse is her dead uncle. But for the most part the genre is as bland as old lettuce, the characters and the plot indistinguishable from one movie to the next.

The races lost their footing in the movies as national interest in the sport waned. In the decades since Seabiscuit was a national hero, sports fans have turned their attention to basketball and football. Other forms of legalized gambling, such as casinos or lotteries, diverted betting away from the tracks. The sport maintains a core group of fans and even something of a presence in popular culture (in Dick Francis's many racetrack mystery novels, for example), but there's little left in horseracing to rope in the uninitiated. A racetrack form guide reads like a sheet of hieroglyphics, and the intricacies of the races are lost in the blur of speed. It is also a sport that produces few reliable constants. Great horses, like Secretariat in 1973 or Funny Cide in 2003, blaze down the track for only a season or two before they are retired or put out to stud. Even in leading racing states such as Kentucky, tracks struggle to get the people through the turnstiles and have had to resort to installing slot machines on the grounds to boost attendance.