Why do you think Barbaro appealed to people who wouldn normally care about horseracing?
I hate to put it this way, but in an age of reality television this became a very comprehensible, digestible story. It was a tragedy unfolding before people’s eyes: would this guy make it, would he survive? Here he was literally at the peak of his profession and within 90 seconds his life is on the line. I think the fight to save a good guy appealed to people. And the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes transcend the normal horse audience, they become much bigger events for the whole country. What also grabbed people was that what happened to him occurred on live television with tens of millions of people watching, and it was so graphic and so horrible that I think people got caught up in the notion of the poor animal and what would happen to him, and they followed the story. This happens to horses all the time, but it doesn’t happen on national television, on a beautiful Saturday, with a horse that had been anointed as the next great thing in racing. I also think that
