LEXINGTON, Ky. -- This weekend's big-money races might be in Louisville, but the heart and history of the weird, insular Kentucky horse subculture lives on the farms outside Lexington.
Narrow lanes weave alongside short stone walls, some centuries old. These are among America's great afternoon drives, winding roads like State Highway 1967 and Iron Works Pike, canopied in green leaves, barely wide enough for two cars. The people working the animals speak with accents from around the globe, because if you love horses, this 20-mile circle starts calling from an early age. Most farm buildings look like spaceships, if the aliens were huge fans of Downton Abbey. A few farms have been abandoned or swallowed or broken up by bankruptcy trustees. Weeds grow over once-grand stone gates; a fallen tree lies across an empty guardhouse.
That's how I started my Derby weekend: an hour east of Churchill Downs, the windows rolled down, visiting stallion managers and bloodstock experts, stopping at the farms where the races are won and lost long before the horses ever see a track.
There's an energy out here this week, like visiting Cooperstown during the World Series. A newborn colt wobbles next to its mother, and not far away, the old Elmendorf Farm cemetery sits quietly. It's on a farm named Normandy now, the big estate carved into pieces over the years. A woman sits at a desk in the small white office, the front door open to the breeze. The weather is perfect, the air smelling green and fresh.
Nearby, Fair Play and Mahubah -- parents of the famed Man o' War -- are buried beneath a statue. Around the corner, there's a worn grave marker on the side of the road for Domino, a famous stallion who produced only 19 foals yet is in the pedigree of the greatest horses who ever lived: Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Assault, Bold Ruler, Whirlaway, War Admiral, Gallant Fox, Omaha, Native Dancer, American Pharoah. Of the 12 horses to win the Triple Crown, nine have Domino in their family tree.
A half-mile down the road, there's a place I've heard about but never seen. A local horse lover told me which unmarked stone and iron gate to approach; when my car gets close, the gate opens. The land is now owned by one of those powerful families who've long come and gone from the world of thoroughbred racing.
A man in a pickup truck eyes me a bit suspiciously.
The road cuts through manicured pastures and rises slightly, headed toward the interior of the property. All this land used to belong to a business partner of the Hearst family who made his millions during one of the many California gold rushes. As an old man, he built a mansion for a new bride, nearly 50 years his junior, and for 12 years, it hosted the kind of parties that will make the papers this week in Louisville, grand affairs, the mansion glowing like an ocean liner. He named it Green Hills, after the view. Twelve years later, he died without a will and the land went to auction, split into pieces. The guy who bought this part couldn't afford the stiff property taxes on a mansion he couldn't afford to keep in the first place. So he tore it down.
He tore most of it down.
Up to the right, I see a flash of white through the trees, and then it comes into view, like something in Rome or on a Tuscan hilltop, the strangest thing: four Corinthian columns and the wide marble and stone entrance stairs, the only part of Green Hills that remains. It's stranded out here like Shelley's statue of Ozymandias in the desert, except instead of sand stretching out to oblivion, it's green Kentucky horse country.
Every one of these farms is owned by someone who made a breathtaking amount of money doing something else, and in that rush of the purchase, most never stop to think that they're almost always buying from someone who'd lost a similarly breathtaking fortune. Every horse farm comes with a silent warning, the construction magnate who took on one project too many, or a coal baron who couldn't survive his industry's decline, or an industrialist family that burned through its inheritance and has, over time, forgotten how to make more money to replace it.
Pieces of racing history often fall through the cracks.
When Greg Goodman, heir to a Houston air-conditioning fortune, bought Mt. Brilliant Farm, he found a collapsing barn on the property. Clearly visible on one of the stall doors, bleached by the sun, was the name of its former resident: Man o' War. This was the great champion's stallion barn. "It still makes the hair on my neck stand up," Goodman says. "It's Mount Vernon. ... George Washington slept here."
Greg's 32-year-old son, Hutton Goodman, drove me around, taking me through the quiet shade of the now-restored barn, and to Domino's grave by the roadside. He says a friend bought some cheap land nearby to ride polo horses and found a rusted plaque: Native Dancer's birthplace. The hidden history is everywhere, as are the booms and busts of the people who tried to grab a piece of that permanence, only to have it slip through their fingers.
That's what has always struck me about the Triple Crown races in general and the Kentucky Derby in particular. Our national psyche is nakedly on display in the owner's boxes. Nowhere in sports is the deeply American idea of striving so visible, the rich and nervous owners; the flavor-of-the-month celebrities in big hats; the ballplayers with money in their pocket for the first time; the new-money families desperate to get something; the old-money families desperate to keep it.
Pick almost any famous old horse and the story will be the same.
Take Man o' War. Hutton points out his barn as we drive up and park. As we walk through the quiet building with four stalls, he tells stories. Near the end of his life, the horse got sick and the owner had a coffin built, complete with the lining, like he was burying a son. Only Man o' War got better, and spent the last three years of his life sharing the barn with his enormous casket. The Goodmans have made their own history, too, the personal kind. Hutton got married out here, and his sister's engagement party was held between the barn and the breeding shed. This is ground zero for their family, and perhaps it will remain theirs for generations, or perhaps some tech billionaire will buy it. The current belles of the American economy are always on display in Kentucky, and especially so in May at Churchill Downs.
Man o' War's barn was built by a wool mogul who had a horse in the Derby 80 years ago, racing against the heir to the Mars candy fortune, a gambler famous enough to be on the cover of Time, a glass magnate, a paper magnate, a Texas ranching family whose descendants are still fighting over the land, and Marshall Field.
This year isn't that much different.
There's two oil and gas men, a pesticide executive, a chemical salesman, a high-interest mortgage lender once called a "loan shark" by the governor of California, a pro hockey team owner and powerful Trump supporter, two investment bankers and a co-founder of A&M Records. The whole thing, to be honest, is right on the line between a ritual and a campy re-enactment. It's almost a renaissance fair for millionaires, who put on the same clothes as the people in those old black and white photos, wearing their straw hats from London and seersucker from uptown New Orleans, hoping to briefly escape the insecurities that drove them to make all that money to begin with. Churchill Downs feels like safe harbor in a world that didn't want them to have those fortunes to begin with and is now trying to take them away.
Men and women come here to chase something like permanence, building monuments to themselves, something to rise above the desert sand or the green grass, proof that they were once here. They see themselves reflected in a great horse's eyes, which actually shine or glow with something primal, often mistakenly described with human emotions like fire and rage. Really it's a mystery, hundreds of years of breeding cranking some unseen genetic engine that some animals have and some do not. It's destiny, which is what the owners are really buying, for the animal and for themselves.
Greg and Hutton Goodman sat with me in their wood-paneled office, which looks out over the aptly named Mt. Brilliant Farm. They have a huge television on the conference room wall, and, after showing me the newest analytics being used to help predict racing success based on bloodlines, they both start to geek out, using the software to track pedigree back centuries, to 1868, to 1735, to a horse from 1689, all carefully notated and recorded. Breeding thoroughbreds connects them to all those animals on their screen, each one who was owned by a family not unlike the Goodmans, who built a fortune and want it to last forever.
Man o' War is buried next to his most famous son, War Admiral, who won the Triple Crown but lost the famous match race to Seabiscuit. Seabiscuit's grave has been lost, at least its exact location; it's somewhere beneath a parking lot owned by a California religious cult. Seattle Slew, who won the Triple Crown 40 years ago, is buried at Hill 'N' Dale Farm near Lexington, which used to be owned by a construction mogul and is now owned by the son of a horse breeder.
The stallion manager Aidan O'Meara takes the former champion Curlin out for some guests, the horse standing there with half an erection, looking bored. One of the people asks whether Curlin is a kind horse, a question O'Meara tolerates with a smile -- thoroughbreds are the equine equivalent of Justin Bieber, divas and brawlers and egomaniacs -- because he knows that racing fans like to put human qualities onto the animals. Horse people sort of hate that. In some ways, the desire to make them pets takes away from their magnificence, the things about DNA and bloodlines we still don't understand, centuries of breeding to create the perfect running machine.
O'Meara remembers the day Seattle Slew arrived, 15 years ago and struggling to recover from an operation, in the last two months of his life. "It was almost like a presidential motorcade," he says with his Irish accent, standing by Slew's stall. "There was five cars in front and five behind the van. It was early, early morning. I can still see the cars coming up over that little hill, all the lights. He just came in as cool as you like. He strolled into that stall."
Six or seven weeks later, unable to recover from an operation, the horse died -- on the 25th anniversary of his Kentucky Derby win. O'Meara and his team pulled him out on a tarp. A man with a backhoe dug a grave and they tied the horse's legs together and lowered him into the ground.
Most horses only have their heart and hooves buried, but O'Meara and his team buried all of Seattle Slew, a sign of respect. He knows it's silly to get too emotionally attached to a horse he knew only a few weeks, but that's how O'Meara felt that morning. Something powerful had left the earth. There was a brief yet completely tangible hole left by Seattle Slew's life force, the unknowable thing that made him so rare and coveted, a convergence of blood and genes that advanced analytics still haven't decoded. All these generations of boom and bust, and all these billions of dollars, made and spent chasing something that almost never arrives.
"I still remember," O'Meara says. "We lowered him down into the grave. I was holding his head. We had a blanket we put over him. People always talked about the fire in his eyes. I can still remember when we pulled the blanket over him, I looked into his eyes one last time. I still get chills talking about it. The fire was gone."