I've Got the Horse Right Here

 I sense that this is not a racing crowd. But since the formerly most powerful world leader has chosen to enter the discussion with a ridiculous tweet, Saturday’s Kentucky Derby seems to be a matter of pith and moment. It beats thinking about bff Kim Jung Un.

 The president called it an example of political correctness, but he knows as much about horse racing as he does about casino gambling. And who else ever went bankrupt owing a casino? My take, which I will get to, is that the incident is another example of the tyranny of our toys.

  What happened was that one of the bettors’ favorites, Maximum Security, was in the process of winning by leading the pack from the starting gate to the finish pole. As the horses made the last turn, Maximum Security drifted to his right. That put him in front of War of Will, whose jockey had to pull him back. The drift also, but less clearly, forced the horses to their right to take the turn more widely. Maximum Security went on to apparently win.

Two jockeys filed objections. The track’s three stewards interviewed them and went to the film. So far, it’s nothing rare in racing. It happens all the time, but not in the previous 144 Derbies. Racing was an early adopter of cameras. The photo finish camera, triggered by the nose of the first horse to reach the finish line, was invented in 1937.  (Bing Crosby had a hand in it.) The stewards, this time, had not only the track’s cameras but the TV network’s.

And so they looked.  And looked. The films were looked at maybe 20 times as often as Florida’s presidential ballots were looked at in 2000. The stewards looked for 22 minutes. If it had gone on much longer, the Supreme Court might have intervened to declare the Republican horse the winner. More than 150,000 people at the track and millions more watched on TV. At stake were, among other things, the winner’s share of the purse, $1.86 million, and all the money bet on Maximum Security.

The politically correct, or at least the more popular, thing for the stewards to do would have been to say, “No harm, no foul.” But the rules of racing say “Thou shall not impede.” The stewards ruled the apparent  runner-up, Country House, the winner. The odds on Country House were 65-1. A $2 bet paid back $132.40 to the rare few who had faith in him.

 I question whether the race should have been decided by  slow motion film. Today we see things human eye had not seen before slo-mo, things unaided human eyes still can’t see. A couple of decades ago, the call on the Derby objection would have been made by stewards who had seen the race in what we now call “real time,” and who could, with film, could see again exactly what they saw. But they could not see what slo-mo shows today. That is something the rules-makers and players of the sport never saw before. Dennis Young of the New York Daily News wrote that slow motion creates its own “false reality” and should be be used for the movement balls, maybe, but not bodies. I agree.

The false reality gives us a God-like feeling, that track stewards saw what God saw, so their ruling must be just. Alleluia.

. . . Except for a few things, most prominently this: War of Will, the horse that almost  everyone agrees was impeded, finished out of the money, eighth. Neither the stewards nor the camera can determine whether he would have fallen back that far had there been no interference. Slo-Mo gave us a kind of reality, but it didn’t give us absolute truth; it didn’t even give us absolute justice.

Like people who hang their lives on their hand-held devices, we have hung the 145^th Kentucky Derby winner on one our toys. And, although we think we finally got it right, we still aren’t sure.