AND THEY’RE OFF! Trying to follow horse racing in a foreign language is like trying to explain American football to a two-year-old. You might be able to do it given some time, but it starts off feeling like a whole new world. During a trip to the Seoul Racecourse Park in Korea, I felt like I could follow what was going on since I could read the Korean well enough. (Yes, I’m still struggling with Thai, I say sheepishly.) Khon Kaen’s horse racing is no less exciting, even without the first-world touches.
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This time around? Well, some stuff is intuitive enough, but there’s a major language barrier if you’re looking to place a serious bet or get your head around every aspect of what’s happening. I’m happy to report the horses are almost a sideshow, compared to watching the humans also hard at work.
Just one of several betting windows. Get a program where you can (20 baht), then peer over the funny names (virtually the only thing in English) or try to make sense of the dense statistics.
On your way in you’ll pass a couple of warm-up loops — your chance to get close to the horses, or simply wonder how old those jockeys are. (To my eye, they looked between 10 and 12 years old.) Just a few of the (human) characters you’ll see:
A self-proclaimed expert in the science (art?) of horse racing. Frequently seen hand-scribbling notes furiously during the pre-race announcements. Perhaps 85–90% of the crowd is male, and save for a single older white guy with what looked like his Thai wife, we were the only foreigners around the crowd of a thousand or so.
Between races, the signs have to be changed, naturally.
The jockeys not yet old enough to know how to shave. Not pictured are a handful of kids playing soccer with what looked like a baseball-sized ball — a great sideshow between races.
The occasional cutie. Not sure if she was helping daddy pick some winners or just drawing in the tiny margins.
There’s also the matter of understanding the odds. While it’s tough to see in this picture, the left half is the key to the odds. The top row shows the odds for that horse to win; the bottom row shows the odds to place. While there’s no decimal point shown, it’s (presumably) understood that your odds go as high as 99-to-1 and not 999-to-1. Not seen here are opportunities to try a Daily Double (pick two winners in a row, humorously spelled ‘Dairy’ at the betting windows) and Forecast (pick the first and second place of a single race), which paid significantly higher odds.
Screens like these were some of the only evidence you were in fact still in the 21st century. This one shows the winners and the final odds they’re paying out (again, there’s an invisible decimal point there — horse 3 won and paid 2.4 to 1). If you win, note it takes a few minutes to get the results confirmed in the computer.
There was a completely different set of betting which remained a mystery — bulletin boards full of business-card-sized slips. My best guess was a betting challenge that involved picking the winners of four or five races in a row… Every half-hour offers you a break from the human sideshow to take in about a minute of splendid excitement:
The race itself doesn’t disappoint — starting on the far side and without warning, between seven and a dozen horses begin making their way around the far side of the dirt track. The five-furlong races (almost exactly one kilometer long) feature a long straightaway stretch that assuredly brings the crowd to their feet.
