The Racing Towns
Towns whose calendar, architecture and money were arranged around horses, and which kept the arrangement after the sport stopped being the only reason to go. The meeting is still the week the town is most itself.
Racing is the only sport that made towns. Football fills a stadium for two hours and empties it; a race meeting requires stables, gallops, sales rings, veterinary practice, farriers and a season, and the places that took it on were reorganised around it permanently. That is the criterion here — not that a city has a racecourse, but that racing shaped what the place is for.
The English towns are the oldest cases and the clearest. Charles II moved his court to Newmarket to race and the Jockey Club that formed there in the 1750s wrote rules the sport still uses across most of the world; three thousand horses train on the heath today. Epsom's contribution is a word: the Derby, first run in 1780 and named on a coin toss, lent its name to every derby since, in other sports and other languages. Ascot was founded by a monarch in 1711 and has never left royal hands. Aintree gave Liverpool the Grand National, and York has run on the Knavesmire since the eighteenth century.
The continental version arrived through the spa. Baden-Baden, Deauville and Saratoga Springs all had water before they had horses, and in each the racecourse was built to hold the season the water had already gathered — which is why all three carry a casino as well. Chantilly is the exception that proves it: a training centre with stables built for a prince who believed he would be reincarnated as a horse, and the grandest racecourse in France beneath them.
The colonial and Gulf entries show the sport as an export. Racing reached Kolkata in 1847 and Mumbai's Mahalaxmi shortly after; Istanbul, Cape Town, Buenos Aires and Melbourne each took it and made something local of it, and the Melbourne Cup stops a country for three minutes on a working Tuesday. Hong Kong turned it into the largest betting turnover in the world at two courses. Dubai, Doha and Riyadh bought the top of the sport outright — the Saudi Cup and the Dubai World Cup are the richest races run — which is a different relationship to it, and a recent one.
Siena belongs here on a technicality that is the best argument in the collection. The Palio is run bareback around a public square twice a summer by riders representing city wards, has been since the seventeenth century, and organises the entire civic life of the place between runnings. It is the purest case of what this collection is about: not a town with racing in it, but racing with a town around it.