Chilean Horse-Racing: The jockeys are bigger, the horses are smaller, and my run of bad luck continues...

It was a chilly night here in Viña del Mar, with the fog from the Pacific ocean rolling in shortly after sundown. I stood behind the grandstand at the Valparaiso Sporting Club holding my progam, warming myself by one of the little wood fires they make to keep the spectators warm. A few meters away the grooms were walking their horses at the open-air paddock, getting ready for the 13th race. The 12th race, and all of the even-numbered races, were being run at Antofagosta, another racetrack north of Viña, that night.

After an eternity of waiting, staring blankly at my program, and trying to ride the line between gathering information from the locals and drawing too much attention to myself, I heard the call to the races. A few minutes later, I went to the side rail to watch the race up close. It was so foggy, I couldn´t even see the horse leave the gate. But soon I heard the thundering of hooves, and then like ghosts a dozen or so horses plunged out of the mist and charged past me to the finish line...

I´ve been to two Chilean thoroughbred racetracks in two days; Hipodromo de Santiago, and the Valparaiso Sporting Club, which is actually here in Viña del Mar, on the Chilean coast. My observations are, in brief:

*The jockeys are bigger.
It´s almost comical, but here the jockeys look like actual normal-sized people. In the U.S. they are tiny, tiny men, with a different physical makeup than most other men. They perch atop their horses almost like little monkeys; compact, contained, determined. Here, it almost looks as if you put a regular-sized person on top of a mule. Strange. Perhaps all of the really small guys flee the country for the bigger purse money in the U.S., leaving the native racing scene to the bigger guys.

*The horses are smaller.
Making the above observation even worse, is that the horses seem to be smaller and skinnier, on average. I did see one or two monsters. In general, however, I think there is a pretty big size-gap. I will look into it further, because they post the weights of various horses, however its in kilograms. Even with my newfound fascination for the metric system, it still doesn´t make complete sense.

*They take turns ridiculously wide.
First off, the racetrack at Viña was probably more than 2,000 meters, or at least 1.25 miles long. In case you don´t know, that´s huge. Instead of the normal oval shape, it was also a sort of three-turn oval, as if you took one side and just stretched it out a bit, kind of like the shape of some Nascar tracks. Anyway, this means most races---which are between 800 and 1300 meters---feature only one turn. Meaning the horses go from the gate, make one turn, or half a turn, and are already on the homestretch.

Thus, some of the jockeys steer their horses so wide on the turns, they almost touch the outside rail! This perplexes me. I suppose it has something to do with the strange size ratios I´ve mentioned above; since the jocks are bigger, the horses smaller, they have actually less control over where the horses go? Maybe they are afraid to steer the horse to much and fall off? All I konw is the whole notion of "jockeying" for position is kind of lost. It´s almost like Greyhound racing, where the dogs go around the last turn and sort of spread out, and that´s that. Let the fastest one close to the rail take the race.

*Betting
As for betting, the minimum bet here is 200 Chilean pesos, that´s like $0.40. Seriously, you can spend an entire night betting 40 cents per turn and not go broke, even if you´re a chronic loser at the races, like I am. I made a 200 peso bet, to show, on a horse in the seventh race, and I won back 220 pesos, so in other words I won 20 pesos....that´s four cents. FOUR CENTS. There was a time I could actually go to the racetrack and hope to walk out in the black, but sadly that time is long gone. It started in 2005 when my two favorite Kentucky Derby horses finished 19th and 20th out of a 20 horse field. Since then, its been a long, slow, downhill run.

But I keep going. It´s in my bones. I literally can´t remember the first time I was at a racetrack, or the first time I touched a horse. It´s almost like an instinct; some people seek out water for relaxation, others seek out the tourist attractions, or what have you... I seek out the race track. However different the racing, there is always the same atmosphere everywhere. There is an constant, ambient level of chatter and activity, punctuated every fifteen minutes by great screams and shouts. Whatever the nation or type of racing, there are the same faces, the same fringe characters, the same kids playing ball or tag on the grandstand while their parents bet the races.

After one race, I saw a little six year old kid toss a handful of betting stubs on the ground in disgust, probably immitating a motion he´d already seen countless times at the racetrack. For better or worse, another unfortunate Track-Junky is born...

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