Effing Michael Wilbon

[King Glorious]

I love the sport. That's why I stay involved in it. But that doesn't mean that I can't see that it is very low in popularity in this country. We see every year when a racing telecast is delayed because another event goes long and the racing fans scream out in horror "I can't believe that they won't switch to racing....screw college football." Racing fans are totally unrealistic when it comes to understanding how little of a national impact the sport has. That's not to say that we are different from other sports fans though. We all are passionate about what we like and don't want to see it "mistreated". As I said earlier, we can come on here and talk about how racing is a joke with it's four-horse fields, it's medication rules and applications, all of the little things that add up to big things that are wrong with the industry...........but let someone outside do it and that's a problem.

The main thing is that the truth is that racing is very, very low in popularity in this country. Even among racing fans, I have always felt that racing is not popular but gambling is. I bet if you go to just about any track or OTB and ask the fans there who won the Derby, the majority wouldn't know...even though they played the race. Ask them the conditions of the Derby (date, distance, track, age of the horses) and I'd bet that most of them don't know. Ask them what three races make up the TC and what are the conditions and I think the majority would have no clue. Maybe I'm wrong though. I know it used to piss me off when I'd be at the track and I'd hear people talking, the usual "who do you like in the 8th?" kind of stuff and it seemed like 80% of the time or more, people just answered in numbers. I hated that they'd just refer to Snow Chief or Sunday Silence or Alysheba as "the four horse."

I guess I just feel that we are very defensive and very unrealistic when it comes to understanding horse racing's popularity among sports fans and the public in general.