Readers Up #14: Saratoga Journal Club

There are four seasons in New York: autumn, winter, spring, and Saratoga. 

In the grand scheme of horse racing, a fair amount of text has been devoted to the Spa. Bare Knuckles and Saratoga Racing, They’re Off!, Graveyard of Champions, and 150 Years of Racing in Saratoga are just a few of the full-length books on the topic, while essays, blogs, tout columns, industry rags, and newspaper listicles explore the highs of hitting it big at the betting windows and the lows of fratty Chads losing their Coronas all over your deck shoes. Maybe I’m projecting. Whatever your amiable vice, Saratoga has it covered, and part of its appeal certainly stems from the simultaneously structured and fluid Spa experience. Saratoga is all things to all people all the time, or at least within the two-odd months of its summer season. As an institution, it revels in plausible deniability and prescriptive transgression. As a physical space, it encompasses outlying luxe and everyday modesty, inviting racegoers to trespass boundaries. As a beehive collective, its backside and apron mirror one another to create inverse, intersecting realities. Two academic articles with popular appeal, “An Ethnography of the Saratoga Racetrack” by Ellen McHale and “Saratoga Style” by Jonathan Silverman, explore the materiality of the Spa especially well.

McHale’s ethnography appeared in the 2003 spring volume of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, at once an off-beat and totally logical spot for a piece largely about backside personnel. Racing is rife with mythology and rituals, secrets, oblique truths, a preoccupation with place bordering on animism. Location for grooms and hotwalkers is centered on the horse, the human elements of any stable orbiting around the equine. The concerns of conditioning a racehorse are not those of handicapping a card, perusing the yearling sale, or participating in class play via feathered fascinators and bowties. The identity of workaday racing employees is maintained in intricate relationships fanning out from the horse, and by its labor maintains the identity of the frontside's horseplayers, tipsters, weekend warriors, and seasonal birds of paradise. If Thoroughbred sport is inherently cyclical, operating on literal and figurative circuits, it’s only natural that in horsey hubs like upstate New York and central Kentucky it become a seasonal myth. Every culture has a harvest sequence. McHale is particularly interested in the racetrack as potential space; one of Saratoga’s signatures is its briefness, its interplay between summer bacchanalia and fallow seasons. It erupts annually in volcanic red-and-white, emerges from its otherwise-placid hometown like Brigadoon, here and gone until the next year. In its time, it transforms: identities are constructed and dissolved, communities form and collapse, hierarchy is rigidly upheld and disregarded entirely. We are not, during Saratoga’s meet, who we might be at Aqueduct or Gulfstream.

Both McHale and Silverman term the Spa meet and its environs a carnival--Carnival, of course, being only a veneer of chaos, a controlled explosion that ultimately serves the status quo. Mythologist Lewis Hyde calls carnival celebrations “profoundly conservative,” a framing Silverman echoes in his piece for The Cambridge Companion to Horse Racing. Nostalgia, racing’s stock-in-trade, is always conservative. Was racing ever comprised of the image continually sold? In the sport’s current moment, is Saratoga’s brand of timelessness a remedy or a mere palliative? Silverman’s essay discusses data and experiences from 2011, but talk of racinos, handle and takeout, class concerns (human and equine), and the various applications of fashion is perennial. Given certain existential threats, it almost seems frivolous to ponder the exact meaning and import of Hat Day… but the swords racing has selected to fight its contemporary battles are often the plowshares of its heyday. A hat may allow assumption of an identity, as may a vest bearing a post number. Backsides are intentional communities, while the frontside is a morass of shifting alliances, day-long feuds, and flirtations that live and die between paddock and wire. The migration of stables into the Oklahoma training track's gate portends and mimics the straying of a vast $2 betting class into the clubhouse and beyond. The Spa's origins with John Morrissey provide a fairy-tale template that racing at large is still selling 160 years later. Nowhere is it so easy to imagine owning a star colt as beneath the striped awnings and broad oaks of Saratoga. There's no harm in dreaming, and racing is a pastime more porous than some; most lifelong football fans have no entry point into actual participation in the sport. But the big-eyed somedays Saratoga inspires! The day-drinking, the extravagant dresses, the rash last-minute bets. Cui bono?

Cui gives a shit? NYRA demurs, patting its pocketbook.

Silverman notes that the Saratoga season is popularly regarded as the best of American racing (except perhaps by some Californians). The quality of horses, jockeys, and trainers is central to its success--or maybe it's that the purposeful managing of historic context and attraction provides an ideal cradle for excellence. Maybe these factors are inextricably intertwined, like calling to like. A seamless eyeline of commerce, sport, money, and beauty invites a racegoer to experience the Spa, rather than visit it. The track is a carousel, revolving in place, a window into a collective glorious history that may not be tenable for the present, or reproducible under other circumstances, in other locales. To that end, how does the ethical horseplayer negotiate Saratoga? I feel almost guilty on the days I attend; everything is to hand, from parking in a rangy walkable lot to ordering Shake Shack on my phone to grabbing a jock's autograph. Every race is analyzed, a glut of available data and opinions. Every horse sauntering into my gaze seems a flawless specimen. Everything--friends I never see otherwise and the sport's luminaries, Grade 1 winners and future stars--is right there, forty minutes from my front stoop. The uncertainty of backside life and the chance inherent in horseplaying are offset by rituals, as McHale describes them, tantalizing, a cobweb spun by those who have gone before. The Spa requires little effort, at least in terms of emotional accessibility. There's always a neighborhood designated as historically significant, while adjacent streets filled with the same architecture run to ruin. And there's an intriguingly fine line between thoughtful preservation of art and thoughtless sale of paint-by-number. 

Does horse racing have a single-origin model? At this late date, are we capitalizing only on copies of the real? Is Saratoga truth in its own right, hyperreal equine sport? Is it useful, in a defensive capacity for the continuation of the sport, or is beauty its own excuse?

Spiritually chilling in the X-Z sections,
Diana