The Life: The Breeders' Cup

In Britain we have the Cheltenham Festival and Royal Ascot, in France they have the Arc and in Australia The Melbourne Cup, while in the Far East there are countless high stakes fixtures at Kranjie, Happy Valley and Sha Tin. In the US they have the Kentucky Derby in May and then the other two legs of the Triple Crown. And then, one spellbinding autumn Saturday, just before the East Coast weather breaks, they have the Breeders' Cup. Or 'Racing's $14 million dollar championship,' as the promoters breathlessly describe it.

'The Breeders' is the Super Bowl of American racing. A sporting and gambling extravaganza with an annual US betting turnover of $108 million-plus. In keeping with the NFL model, the production rotates around the country, from venue to venue.

My first experience of the occasion was in 1987, at Hollywood Park, Los Angeles, which is actually in Inglewood - right under the flight path of the incoming 747s at L.A.X. Two-thirds empty on a Wednesday afternoon, it felt like Walthamstow dog track with palm trees. But 72 hours later, it was packed to the rooftops with 60,000 whooping railbirds, ranging from the biggest of 'the big dogs' to the ordinary Joes. The atmosphere was electrifying, with all of us high on adrenalin and feasting on an ascending drama of seven Grade One races, culminating in the $3 million Breeders' Cup Classic - back then, the richest horse race in the world.

This year the meeting is at Lone Star Park, Grand Prairie, Texas, an upstart newcomer near Dallas-Fort Worth and very brash compared to such classic settings as Santa Anita and Churchill Downs. European racing's first eleven of owners, trainers, jockeys, racing managers, bloodstock agents and hangers-on have been going over to the Breeders' Cup since the meetings began in 1984. But, if you're an ordinary fan and punter making the trip for the first time this autumn, you're strongly advised to get there early, make a week of it and savour the colourful build-up.

Groom with a view
American racehorses are stabled in training barns adjacent to the track. In the run up to the Breeders' some of the world's most valuable bloodstock will be out breezing from 6-9am. That early morning back stretch ambience is something special. In L.A. the sun would start rising by about seven o'clock, there would be a deliciously fresh and dewy smell winning out over the aeroplane fumes and the sound of cars on nearby Century Boulevard. A lot of the grooms and work riders are Hispanic, no doubt one day hoping to emulate legendary jockeys like Puerto Rican Angel Cordero and Panamanian Laffite Pincay Jr. From the barns and grooms' quarters comes the crackle of Spanish radio stations and CD's mixed with the sound of snorting horses, muttered exclamations and fumbles and swearing.

The smell of horse shit doesn't change much from Europe to America, but from the other side of the course comes the infinitely more fragrant aroma of frying bacon, pancakes and hot coffee, where a part of the racecourse catering facility has been opened up to serve breakfast to the large gallery of attendant work-watchers. The local sports writers don't disappoint either, many of them conforming to their traditional celluloid image as a cross between Walter Matthau and Frank Sinatra in his Pal Joey era. 'Don't they know it's a long way to come for a day out?' joked one merciless Chicago scribe, watching the Europeans at exercise at Arlington Park two years ago. 'Hawk Wing has already proved he can lose races in Europe. Why cross the Atlantic to prove the same thing here?'

As far as the visiting press are concerned, the Breeders' Cup is the best gig of the year. Helpful publicists keep you supplied with a seemingly endless file of news, facts and quotes, while after hours the organisers really know how to look after their visitors in style. There's always a lavish media party two nights before the big day, featuring great roasts of beef, ham and turkey, iced crayfish, lobster and crab, not to mention just about every kind of alcoholic drink you can think of.

All aboard the gravy train
When the Cup is in Louisville they hold the bash on the Belle of Ohio steamboat. In Florida it's always at a Fort Lauderdale country club, facing out over the intra-coastal waterway. Guests are piped in by a bevy of shapely blondes and brunettes in jockettes' silks and, after being plied with champagne, are conducted outside to a kind of checkerboard built out over the water. Each square on the board offers the food, drink and music of a different country, and one or two intrepid hacks boast of having toured the board half a dozen times before the night's end. Perhaps as a result of partying too much, there's always some gushing British journalist who describes the

Breeders' Cup as racing's equivalent of the Olympics. Or at the very least the Ryder Cup. It's nothing of the sort. The event was devised by the big US breeders themselves - men like Seth Hancock of Claiborne Farm, John R Gaines of Gainesway Farm and Leslie 'Big Daddy' Combs of Spendthrift Farm - and was intended to boost the domestic American racing industry, which they felt had been losing ground to other sports like basketball and the NFL.

Going out with a bang
The good old boys realised they had to counter that trend, cultivate a new fan base and bring in new money with it. So they came up with the idea of a megabuck, end-of-season championship. One high-octane afternoon, showcasing everything best about horse racing, that would enjoy live coast-to-coast TV coverage. It's been a spectacular success. Over its 20-year history the Breeders' has innumerable champions and championship performances, from great American horses like Ferdinand, Alysheba and Cigar to memorable European winners like Pebbles, Miesque and Arazi, not forgetting so-near-yet-so-far heroic losers like Giant's Causeway and Dayjur.

The two Turf races on the programme (expanded to three recently) have nothing to do with sportsmanship or the Olympic spirit. They simply reflect the commercial realities of the modern international bloodstock industry. European owners, especially the likes of Sheikh Mohammed and the Coolmore Mafia, have spent fortunes in Kentucky. So having them run some of their best horses, many of them American bred, on Breeders' Cup day makes good commercial sense for everyone involved.

Outside of New York state, horses are allowed to race while using medications Bute and Lasix. Some European stables make use of this dispensation when they're over there, distressing many traditional racing lovers, who fear for the integrity of the sport and the future of the breed. But the blunt truth is that when $3 million is on the line, most contemporary owners will take every edge going.

If you're actually going over to Lone Star Park and haven't done your betting ante-post, be prepared for the anomalies and hypocrisies of America's gambling laws. It may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but in most corners of the republic it's easier to buy an AKA automatic assault rifle than it is to place a legal off-course bet on the 3.30 at Monmouth Park. Las Vegas may be Sin City, but there's also a strong puritanical streak in the American character dating back to the 17th Century witch trials, and in the eyes of the moral majority gambling is - like alcohol, communism and gay sex - wicked. Taboo.

Home of hypocrisy
On-course bookmaking was banned across the nation in 1907, and the only places where off-course bookmaking is legal are Nevada and Atlantic City, New Jersey. The big casinos like Ballys and Caesars Palace run sports books out of lavishly-equipped betting theatres on the casino premises. Punters get waitress service and knock-down rates for 'food and beverages' - just like in the gaming rooms next door.

All on-course wagering has to take place with the Pari-Mutuels or PMU windows. The initials may be the same as in France but the American PMU's - which are run individually, state-by-state and track-by-track - are very different to the Longchamp model. There are dozens of outlets on every level of a big American racecourse grandstand. Service is generally slick, fast and they take everything from $2 a race up to six figure sums. Single bets of $200,000, $300,000 and even half-a-million bucks are not uncommon on Breeders' Cup and Kentucky Derby day, and it's possible to go higher so long as prior agreement has been reached with the track management.

There are the usual range of Tote bets such as jackpots, placepots, trifectas and so on and, unlike France, there are also limited opportunities to take a price on events like the Breeders', with racetracks staging a 'future betting period' several weeks in advance. Of course, in Las Vegas they'll offer you a price on anything a year in advance, but in most states it's illegal to have a telephone or even an online bookmaking account. So respectable citizens are forced to actually go out to Nevada to bet, if they want to stay within the law.

A further restriction of liberty is proposed by the so-called Kyle Bill, which has been floating around congress for the last two or three years. Introduced by Arizona Senator Richard Kyle, it seeks to make all online gambling illegal for American citizens, including Americans abroad, thus closing down the US market to British and off-shore firms like Ladbrokes and Victor Chandler.

Typically, restrictive legislation has done nothing to suppress illegal bookmaking, which thrives in every city in every state. Be it in the guise of some local bartender who settles bad debts with a baseball bat, or the Chicago big shots and Elmore Leonard types you see vacationing in South Florida during the winter, there are always illegal bookies around - and card sharps, pool room hustlers and top of the range hookers - in Louisville in Kentucky Derby week, and if past Breeders' Cups are any guide, they'll find their way to bible-bashing, gun-toting Texas too.

Also present - though not necessarily on the VIP guest list - will be representatives of the big British betting shop chains, who are allowed to bet in to the on-track pools in an effort to lay off or 'reflect' liabilities incurred from their own domestic odds on the Breeders Cup races. The Las Vegas bookies invariably price up the European runners a lot more generously than Hills and Coral and vice versa - in fact the discrepancies between the two sets of odds ought to give knowledgeable Europeans a chance to clean up. Unfortunately it doesn't always work out that way.