For those that
might not have noticed, there’s an important horse race to be run today at
Belmont Park, New York.
To begin,
California Chrome has a chance to win the Triple Crown, a feat that hasn’t been
accomplished since 1978. This entails winning three consecutive races against
the best three year-old Thoroughbreds in the country, The Kentucky Derby, the
Preakness Stakes and finally the Belmont Stakes. While there are more valuable
races, none carry the prestige of these three classics.
The race takes
on particular significance this year. California Chrome is owned by a pair of
working class men and their wives, hardly Thoroughbred racing elite. The owners of the horse
also were his breeders; he’s the product of a relatively cheap mare and a
second-tier stallion, a California home-bred in an industry dominated by Kentucky
elites.
Kentucky is
hardly a center of power among states until you talk Thoroughbreds. It’s there
that the kings and power players of the world operate with a relative strangle-hold
on the best racing bloodlines to be had. If they don’t own the best, they soon
will.
Texans, New
Yorkers, Floridians, Californians, Saudis, Japanese, British royalty; they and
more all bow to the Kentucky elite.
The
consolidation of power in the Thoroughbred industry is not unlike what you see
in public and private industry with the empire of the United States or the
European Union, perhaps the newly emerging BRICS nations, Wal-Mart, Monsanto,
Microsoft, the Federal Reserve bank, etc.: bigger entities dominate, subdue,
and swallow smaller competitors to the point of elimination. Submit or die.
One may say that
is not the desired effect of these entities; that point is arguable; the result
is not; they have in effect wiped out most adversaries.
The battle is
not over. Nature favors entropy: a big body forms; wind and rain and storms
break that body into smaller pieces.
Cajuns want to
be Cajuns; a mountain man will do as he wills. A Northern California hippie
lives as he sees fit, as does a Maine fisherman. Puritans fled the Church of England;
Martin Luther broke from the Catholic Church. Afghani tribesmen live as they
wish as do Arab Bedouins. An Oregon logger lives in a different world than a
New York stock broker.
People refuse to
submit to a one-size-fits-all mentality.
When it became
apparent that Perry Martin and Steve Coburn owned a freak of nature, an anomaly,
the big horse from humble origin, they were offered 6 million dollars for a 51%
stake in the animal.
They refused the
offer.
They are not
wealthy.
But they had a
dream and that dream was not for sale.
They kept their
horse and to date, they have beaten the big boys.
They acknowledge
that the horse is no longer theirs, that it has become property of the people,
all the little guys out there with dreams of one day rising from the fray, not
to make money, but just to be.
Un-owned.
Go California
Chrome.
