🌎 Resumen en español · traducción automática
Editor’s note: Every October, tens of thousands of people drive out the Versailles Pike to Keeneland and file through a set of stone gates that look as though they’ve stood there since the beginning of thoroughbred time. They haven’t. Keeneland opened in 1936 — young, as Lexington racing goes. For the 107 years before it, the horses ran somewhere else: on a one-mile dirt oval at the east end of Fifth Street, hard against Race Street, in a neighborhood most Lexingtonians now know for a housing project that isn’t there anymore either. This is the story of the track Keeneland replaced — the Kentucky Association course — told, as much as possible, in the words of the Lexington papers that watched it live and die. Every newspaper quoted below is in the public domain.
Silence on Race Street
In the first days of 1936, the turf writer Brownie Leach walked out to the old Kentucky Association track for the Lexington Leader and wrote what amounts to an obituary:
“Silence envelops Lexington’s old Kentucky Association track. There are no trainers gathered around a red-hot stove discussing bright two-year-old prospects in their respective barns. Nor are there any grooms shaking down the old stalls and arguing over potential Derby winners. No more will thoroughbreds prove their mettle by taking that hill off the backside or throw muddy water over the rail as they splash through the sand training track. Spring will return to the old racetrack, but the customary railbirds won’t be there to sun themselves along the backstretch. Nor will there be any horses to train over the course. When spring returns the carpenters’ hammers will replace the pounding of horses’ hoofs. The old racetrack is only a memory. It passed from existence in 1935.”…