Charles P. Pierce on the 2011 Breeders’ Cup – Grantland
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7202943/the-decline-horse-racing
There are easier ways to gamble these days. There are other sports that are more suited to television and the other forms of instant communication, more conducive to a human attention span reckoned now in milliseconds. Even on a weekend like the one just passed, in which the sport puts everything it has going for it on full display, and at Churchill Downs, one of the few places that even the casual sports fan can recognize, there is still a sense about the sport that it has become unstuck in time, to borrow Billy Pilgrim’s phrase. That it is a door into the past from a present, a present in which history is whatever came in over your BlackBerry 25 seconds ago. That it is drifting further and further away into misty obsolescence, that it exists now somewhere deep in the hours before the dawn of whatever age it is our technology has brought to us. Men — and women — and horses, it seems, are something now that might as well have been painted on the walls of a cave.
Posted via email from Michael Pizzolla On ValueCapping™, Horse Racing, And Technology
